Transition from one ERP to another is rare (at least until recently). When it happens, there is a sense of excitement, but a quick realization that it is an arduous task. Such transitions require careful planning as well as the cooperation of many members of the institution. And almost always, even the well laid out plans don’t always work, so, not letting the roadblocks that come in the way affect the morale of the team, but finding workarounds and the willingness to accept some compromises is essential. We experienced all of these during the past three years and I am very happy to say that we have achieved a major milestone and will begin the process of opening up Workday student in a couple of weeks.

It will be a phased approach whereby the students will begin using different features at different times. During the first phase, all students will have the ability to review their personal information and make modifications themselves. We have also moved the checklist for the incoming first years from a custom application to Workday.

The use of Banner will essentially come to a halt in late June, at which point, we move student financials, and grading for some of the summer courses to Workday student. This will then be followed by first year students registering in August, Add/Drop for all students etc. Given the enormity of this transition, we anticipate problems and are gearing up to support our community through the transition. In other words, our work will continue to remain in high gear for several months even after the cutover!

This has been a terrific collaboration amongst colleagues from several administrative departments at the College. Several faculty members have also assisted us with valuable input – members of CCAP (Committee on Curriculum and Academic Policy), ACLTP (Advisory Council on Library and Technology Policy), a faculty focus group that we convened and the department and program chairs. Based on lessons learned from previous two implementations, we engaged the faculty much more this time and frankly, it has helped us configure the system better at the get go.

I want to thank all the members of the team for their hard work and creative thinking, without which we will not be here. Data conversion is an extremely hard task. I don’t want to hear from anyone “Oh, you are just an undergraduate school with 2400 students”! Sure, the scale matters, but in reality, the complexities of data doesn’t necessarily scale by the number of students. Frankly, in some larger institutions, the policies and consistencies are their friend in lessening the complexities of data. The complexities are everywhere – academic requirements, transfer credits, GPA calculation etc. and they are really not a function of the number of students. Where the scale really matters is in validation of the converted data. Anyways, the members of the team rose to the occasion.

Managing such implementations have come a long way. I was part of the implementation of PeopleSoft and associated “surround systems” about 23 years ago. The project planning and execution today is very different and more  efficient. These implementations require a strong partner and we are all extremely happy with our partner  – Alchemy. We had their “A” team working with us and the chemistry between  them  and our team  was a key to the success. Similarly, Workday has been extremely responsive in providing us some of the key configurations, and business processes that we absolutely needed. Our collaborations with several other higher eds was also another key factor in getting us to where we are.

I know that when we open it up, just like all technologies, there will be issues. It is also true that when things don’t work as expected, the natural tendency is to criticize us. I just ask the community to pause and think for a minute how hard the team members have worked for the past couple of years to get us to where we are – a system that will be better, easy to use and the right choice for the future. I want to assure the community that we will attend to the issues as quickly as possible and solve them!

If we think that we are all in it together, we can make these systems work and perform better for all of us!