Deployment Group Five (DG5) Gears Up for ctcLink Go-Live
As fall quarter gears up, colleges are welcoming students back to classes. This quarter, we will also welcome eight more colleges to ctcLink — Bellevue College, Bellingham Technical College, Big Bend Community College, Everett Community College, Grays Harbor College, Green River College, Skagit Valley College, and Whatcom Community College.
DG5 is the largest ctcLink deployment group yet and will convert to ctcLink over three weekends:
- Group DG5-A – Oct. 8 to Oct. 11, 2021: Green River College, Skagit Valley College
- Group DG5-B – Oct. 22 to Oct. 25, 2021: Bellingham Technical College, Big Bend Community College and Whatcom Community College
- Group DG5-C – Nov. 5 to Nov. 8, 2021: Bellevue College, Everett Community College and Grays Harbor College
All the DG5 colleges are extremely busy with final preparation activities to go live on ctcLink. They are wrapping up User Acceptance Testing (UAT) activities and hard at work preparing each member of their college community to be ready for ctcLink.
The DG5 colleges are regularly communicating with their college community, finalizing their go-live weekend and support plans, and actively participating in training.
This is an exciting time for the DG5 college ctcLink teams as they can start to see the benefits of all of their hard work. This also marks the beginning of significant changes in most business processes, as well improving service to students with more integrated tools and technology resources.
All ctcLink colleges should plan for ctcLink to be offline for go-live weekends
ctcLink will be offline for all colleges live on ctcLink during each conversion weekend. ctcLink Colleges should communicate in advance with staff and students. Colleges may consider these conversion weekends and go-live dates when planning for the subsequent quarter’s registration cycle.
ctcLink Service Downtimes for DG5 Go-Live – Fall 2021
- Friday afternoon, 5 p.m., Oct. 8, 2021 to Monday morning, Oct. 11, 2021
- Friday afternoon, 5 p.m., Oct. 22, 2021 to Monday morning, Oct. 25, 2021
- Friday afternoon, 5 p.m., Nov. 5, 2021 to Monday morning, Nov. 8, 2021
DG6 Go-Live weekends in 2022 will follow a similar outage schedule.
Readiness, set, go live
The colleges, ctcLink Project, and the SBCTC ctcLink Support team are in the final phases of assessing their go-live readiness — measuring each college’s preparedness to transition to ctcLink, as well as SBCTC readiness. The readiness milestones are both technical- and people-focused: data, security, testing, training, support planning, transition plans and builds from Legacy to ctcLink, communication, and organizational change management.
The UAT, conversion activities, and readiness assessment provide DG5 colleges a good idea of issues to expect at go-live. These activities and other readiness indicators, tracked by the colleges and SBCTC ctcLink Project team, inform the college’s initial go-live decision.
- DG5-A colleges (Green River and Skagit Valley) will provide their official go-live recommendation to the ctcLink Steering Committee, which will then review and vote on DG5-A go-live readiness on Sept. 28.
- DG5-B and DG5-C colleges will provide their official go-live recommendations to the ctcLink Steering Committee, which will review and vote on DG5-B and D go-live readiness on Oct. 5.
Once DG5-C goes live, 25 of Washington’s 34 community and technical colleges are expected to be live on ctcLink. Colleges throughout the state look forward to all colleges being on ctcLink and shifting the focus to developing further ctcLink improvements that will provide even better service for our students and college communities.
