Workday Rising, Workday’s annual customers’ conference, welcomed more than 8,500 participants from around the globe, including a group from UT Austin’s own Workday Implementation Program, along with campus leaders from HR, Academic Personnel Services, Financial Aid and the College of Pharmacy. The conference, held in Chicago, Oct. 9-12, featured customer case studies, deep-dive demonstrations, and forums for Workday clients to share ideas.
The university’s Workday team members came away with a strong sense of validation that the university’s Workday HCM/Payroll implementation plan is on the right track and that the methodical, campus-inclusive approach that’s been adopted will help avoid pitfalls that other universities have experienced.
Networking with other higher education users, including University of Washington, Penn State, and Ohio State University, shed light on many best practices, as well as a few gaps. For example:
- End-to-end testing – A university successfully engaged a broad group across their campus by using a round table approach for testing rather than a traditional lab setting. Multiple users from the same college (and in the same workflow routing path) sat at the same table during testing sessions.
- Regional experts – A university linked related units together into regional groups of Workday experts who focused on specific areas, such as academic HCM. These groups participated in end-to-end and end-user testing, communicated issues to the project team, and assisted campus users at go live. This model is in line with UT Austin’s super user strategy, which is currently being developed.
- Benefits – Some universities have encountered difficulties with keeping benefits in sync, and UT Austin’s Workday team members are gathering more information on these issues, lessons learned, and how to remedy problems before they arise.
pictured above: UT Austin’s Workday Implementation Program team members attend Workday Rising.
Krista Hadavi, a payroll services employee who is also working on the Workday implementation, said hearing from the higher-ed clients validated UT Austin’s methodical approach to our own implementation.
“Several customers described their implementation approach as being focused on speed and just getting the product live,” said Krista. “That approach led to less than ideal conditions after go live. For me, this validated the proactive approach we are taking in identifying potential issues, so we can mitigate risk ahead of time.”
Looking ahead, Workday promises new features which could benefit campus in the future, including a new cloud platform to build applications in Workday that are currently being built outside Workday to fill gaps in the system. Workday is also looking to expand its service request functionality which may serve some of the university’s service request workflow needs in the future.
Workday HCM/Payroll will go live on campus in Nov. 2018. The announcement was made on Oct. 17 at a Town Hall and Open House which featured program updates, including a timeline and milestones, and demonstrations of the system.