Month of October has been a little crazier than usual. I attended Workday Rising 2017 in Chicago earlier this month, which was a great experience. The conference was huge and I got to meet very interesting group of people. Keynotes were interesting, but nothing out of the ordinary, but some of the sessions were fantastic. All of us who attended learned a lot. Then I organized a NERCOMP Professional Development Opportunity on finding a unified alumnae system on Oct 19th. It was well attended and the attendees benefited from hearing from all of us who are in various stages of finding a solution to this.

I was in Philly for EDUCAUSE from Oct 31 till Nov 2nd and will be leaving for Hong Kong next week. Here is the scoop on Workday…

We went live with Workday HCM (Human Capital Management) on 1/1/2017. This is the day we moved all of our operations related to HR, payroll and benefits to Workday from Banner. This is a big deal and given the enormity of this transition, things went really well. The key to major implementations like this is less technology than how we manage such complicated changes. Change management is a subjective term and has evolved into a discipline in which professionals get trained. I would say we managed this change well by practicing it the old fashioned way – effective communication and solving problems for our users with a sense of urgency.

We implemented several process changes which required us to be extra vigilant. For example, the chairs of the academic department began approving time for academic administrators, which required training the chairs specifically. There were a lot of changes in terms of terminology that required us to bring everyone on board. Dining services employees shared a device to record their time, which posed an initial challenge that needed to be overcome, which we did quickly. You name it, our team solved them as efficiently and quickly as possible. Despite the fact that Workday has an excellent reporting environment, it also applies the security in the strictest possible fashion, which required us to put on our creative hats to make sure that our users had access to data that they needed.

While we were supporting the HCM rollout, we began the implementation of Workday Finance, which was successfully rolled out on 7/1/2017. This touches a lot more staff in a more direct way than HCM. For example, several administrative staff are engaged in purchasing and paying for services and goods. And they do this on a regular basis. Similarly, faculty and staff file for expense reimbursement for travel and other purchases such as books.

We began the new fiscal year in Workday, while working to close the books in Banner for fiscal year 2017. We were off to a reasonable start because the month of July tends to be a slow month. Many of the academic staff don’t work during the summer, so when they returned in August, there were a lot of tickets to the Helpdesk ticketing system and new issues arose. This was a bit challenging because we were also preparing for the start of the semester. But the team worked hard and did a fantastic job.

We continue to encounter issues and are handling them well. This also has given us a great opportunity to rethink and implement new business processes. We had a lot of concern about changing the way we were supporting the expense reimbursement for the faculty. However, the faculty welcomed the change because they were getting reimbursed in record time and also in Workday they had direct access to information that they did not have in Banner.

One of the key element to success in such major projects is your implementation partner. We worked with Sierra Cedar Inc. Over a period of time, both our team and their team developed a good chemistry to make the project successful. In all honesty, it got off to a rocky start because we were entering an unknown territory with new terminology and a very different administrative system than we have been used to, but things improved over time.

We just began Workday student implementation in collaboration with Bentley University. We have decided to work with Alchemy for this project. This is a critically important project that will touch every member of the community. We have given ourselves approximately 2 years to complete this for that reason. We liked the approach that Alchemy proposed to us for implementation and also they have recruited consultants who are very familiar with the student product which is relatively new. Our initial design meeting had a very different dynamic than the previous ones because we are now familiar with Workday and its capabilities, but also because, the consultants impressed everyone with their deep knowledge of the product as well as our own business processes. We are all energized and ready for another major implementation!

I have repeated this many times over, but, I will say it again! One of the best things to come out of this is the collaborative spirit within the College. We needed to bring together members from HR, Finance, Student Financial Services, the Provost’s Office, Resources, Wellesley Centers for Women and of course, LTS, to make this a successful implementation. Everyone worked so well together and so hard! The collective goal to make this a success was evident and the fact that we accomplished what we set out to do is proof that we succeeded. I thank everyone in the team who worked so unbelievably hard to make this happen.

Of course, these implementations always have anxious moments, worries and concerns! We had our share of them too… At least for my team, I always say “I don’t want to hear the word concern, unless you also have a solution to address the concern!”