When Lisa Stensland, senior project manager of administrative systems for the Cornell Office of Information Technologies, pulled into the parking lot at 120 Maple Ave. at 11:30 Saturday night, July 29, she was prepared for a long weekend. The work had started Thursday night and would continue through the following Tuesday morning, but "This was when the Big Party was," she recalls.

Already there were people from CIT and a representative from the consulting firm CedarCrestone. Staff from Human Resources, Payroll, Alumni Affairs and Development, and Student Administration joined in on Sunday morning. Others were connected from their homes and offices. Snack food, fruit, soda and juice were on hand. Two air beds had been brought in.

The Big Party lasted through Sunday morning, and after a few final operations on Sunday and Monday, the team had completed a $3 million upgrade to the university's administrative computer system.

And hardly anyone else noticed.

The PeopleSoft software system keeps track of every faculty member, staff member, student and alumnus. It manages employee records, health insurance and vacations. It keeps course lists, notes donations and grants, and writes paychecks. Like any other software, it occasionally needs an upgrade. After August 2007, version 8.0 would no longer deal properly with changes in tax laws and other regulations. It was time to move to version 8.9.

Everyone knows how an upgrade goes: Put in a disk, click "OK" and restart the computer. This was a little more complicated. The upgrade project was approved and launched Aug. 8, 2005, with Stensland as project manager. It became her full-time job for a little over a year. Planning and preparation paid off, bringing in a project originally budgeted at up to $5 million at only $3 million -- mostly for over 19,000 hours of CIT staff time and 15,000 hours of staff time in other departments -- and six months early.

To make PeopleSoft work at Cornell, CIT programmers had made some 180 "customizations" -- rewriting parts of the program. Those same customizations had to be written into the new version.

Databases are made up of "tables" that link one piece of data to another -- associating employees with positions or alumni with their giving history, for example. For this version, PeopleSoft decided to rearrange the tables, so data had to be copied over into the new format.

Then there were external applications that reach into the PeopleSoft system to read or write information, like COLTS, Just the Facts or the data warehouses used to prepare reports, that had to be changed to reach into new places in new ways.

Stensland compiled a list of 731 steps in the final switchover, which had to be completed in 72 hours to avoid interrupting the university's business more than necessary -- hence the Big Party. Representatives of the various departments worked in a "war room" testing each change. "It was like air traffic control," Stensland recalls.

There were periodic backups so that if changes didn't work the old setup could be restored. That meant periods of waiting, so a DVD player with a stack of movies and a Sony PlayStation 2 were brought in. Stensland apologized for an emphasis on "chick flicks." Only a few people seemed to need sleep. One snoozed on a desk and later on an air bed. Another slept on an unpadded floor.

It all led up to a "go/no-go" decision at 9 a.m., Sunday, followed by the re-creation of the data warehouses that lasted until Tuesday morning. The 60-hour marathon had stretched the $3 million budget by another $275 to include 108 cans of soda, $16.12 worth of juice, 20 pounds of fruit and $80.66 worth of snack foods. Over its entire life the project spent $2,132 for "sustenance."

"We track everything," Stensland notes.

"The neatest thing about the project is that most people on campus probably weren't aware that it happened, but it was a huge project, and it came in ahead of schedule and under budget," Stensland concludes. In six or seven years, she adds, they will probably have to do it again.