The purpose of the Project Definition Document is to explicitly state the conditions surrounding the entire Banner Upgrade project. This document defines the rules of work, outlines the roles all parties will play during the project, and provides a project framework. To develop a referenceable set of documents that can be used to measure the project. To identify the conditions under which the project will be conducted, to include by definition the work to be completed, deferred, and excluded from the project and to identify the role members of the project will play. To describe the project so that any new member to the teams will be able to understand the rationale, scope and process for the project.
Every information system has a life cycle, similar to the human life cycle.
The genesis of Banner at Laurier was in 1989, when a collective decision was made to purchase this software package. Laurier currently operates an early release of Banner 2.0, which SCT stopped supporting in the fall of 1997. This version of Banner is not Year 2000 compliant, and will fail at some time within the next year. While a decision to upgrade was first made in January 1996, and reconfirmed in February 1997, for various reasons nothing was done until the summer of 1997. Serious planning for the upgrade began in the fall of 1997.