Wintonbury Hills Golf Course, Bloomfield, CT

I decided to take a week off, but it is turning out to be more like “work from home”. This is life, I guess. No complaints. I did get a few rounds of golf in.

As we are going through the Workday implementation, it is very clear that Workday has a very clear and strict process for a reason. We all have opinions on the process itself, but what I see is that it imposes a level of discipline that we are all not used to. Especially, they have a concept of “In Scope” and “Out of Scope”. This therefore requires us to think very deeply about what we want in scope early on. There are slight variations on the theme that are always supported, it is just that the typical large variations that we are all used to that is not possible.

Why? Because, those of us who have been in this business already have experienced the pain of scope creep. In tech related projects, it goes like this – techies first want as complete a project plan as possible; it doesn’t happen, so they complain; then they deliver some initial prototypes; functional offices are thrilled to see it; their creative juices flow and they now want this and that; a lot of times some techies feed this by saying, “yeah this can be done but you should really see this cool stuff”; such back and forth then becomes the way the project is handled; the project crawls; the ex-enthusiastic techies are now disgruntled and say “I can’t wait to get off this project” because this has become a drag and they want to move to the next exciting project; finally, both the techies and the functional owners complain that the other party is not delivering.

Instead, how about saying “folks, we have a common set of goals. This requires discipline. Let us define what is important for day 1. You should really let the creative juices flow, because this is very important for us to construct a solid foundation, but remember, not everything you ask for will be possible on day 1. Just park the less important ones for later. And please don’t say that everything you come up with is equally important”.  In other words, creativity is to be accommodated, but within bounds. If only we can all get to this point, our projects will be better and move faster.

I always feel that Higher Ed administrative projects are treated like research projects. They tend to be explorations. However, researchers set broad and general goals for a research project. This won’t work for administrative projects. We need to be more precise about the end game. The outcomes are not always predictable in a research project, and they typically tend to branch off in other areas. This is the nature of the research game. Unfortunately, the same exact method may not be suitable for administrative projects.