Since my arrival at Wellesley about seven and a half years ago, we have reorganized several times. My approach to this is fairly simple: we are here to provide the best possible services and if the way we are organized is coming in the way of achieving that goal, change it. One of the patterns that will be evident at LTS over the years is a serious commitment to increasing the resources for certain groups, projects and activities that support the academic enterprise while managing the administrative departments through business process improvements which in turn reduces the staffing required to support them. We have been pretty good about achieving these so far.

When we decided to move to Workday, it was clear that the Enterprise Solutions group, which consisted of staff who supported all administrative systems such as Banner, Luminis Portal, Oracle, and the Reporting environment , needed to change. The reason is that Workday paradigm is drastically different. When we moved from Luminis to Drupal for portal, it was a great opportunity to rethink staffing because Luminis required a fair amount staffing support. We began the process about four years ago and this past February we announced a major reorg and we no longer have an Enterprise Solutions group!

What we have done instead is to merge the group that was primarily responsible for project management, implementation, configuration and business process management in Workday (therefore no programming) with the Enterprise Solutions group. The new group is called Business Analysis and Technology Solutions group. We have also done some other reorgs, but I want to discuss just the one concerning Enterprise Solutions here.

The merger is not simply forklifting the functions and staff from one group to the other. It is a big change. Many staff members in the Enterprise Solutions group did a fair amount of PL/SQL programming and they will virtually do none of that in a year. During the transition, they will continue to do a little of it, but concentrate mostly on being a functional business analyst. What this means is that they are going to be working far more closely with the functional offices to understand the business processes to help configure Workday to improve services as well as simplify some of the convoluted business processes that we have in collaboration with the functional offices.

Though they used to do some of this before, it is very different in that they will soon be the functional subject matter experts. In addition, they are also the “doers” in that they will be able to configure Workday to deliver solutions that helps the community in the end. I am so thankful for all the staff who have seamlessly transitioned into these roles.

We also have created teams in our Business Analysis and Technology Solutions group. Each team’s primary responsibility is a certain group of functional areas and the members of each group are expected to be sufficiently knowledgeable about these functional areas. Each staff member is in two teams. One where the staff member is “primary” and the other where the person is “secondary”. And each team has a team lead whose primary responsibility is project management and not personnel management. This team approach provides a much needed knowledge redundancy for functional areas. Too often we have this one person who is the expert and then we are all scrambling for “brain dump” and scary scenarios when this person chooses to leave the College. Our plan is to avoid this through the team approach.

I have always thought about the fact that the academic computing support or instructional technology support rarely involves programming. In most cases, the staff in this area become experts in using existing software and systems and working with the faculty and students to understand their needs and provide the necessary support. The new approach that we are taking is a parallel in the administrative area. Know the software and the systems, engage with the functional areas to get a deeper understanding of how to improve the administrative processes using these tools, rather than writing new systems or customizing existing systems. There are new tools that make this possible in the administrative realm!

So far so good and it is working very well… We could not have done this without he cooperation from all the staff who are involved!