Stories

 

The first phase of our Workday Student system is now in production.  This achievement reflects the work of over one hundred of your coworkers who put in literally thousands of hours of effort over the last 15 months.  The successful implementation of this first phase (known to us as Move To Production One, or MTP1) also builds upon the successful implementations of Workday Human Capital Management (HR) in 2019 and Workday Finance in 2021.

 

This phase of the Workday Student implementation concentrated on more of the "back office" types of processes that many of you as faculty and staff will not see, but which are essential to running the University.  The second phase of the Workday Student implementation, or MTP2, is scheduled to go live on March 6, 2023.  You will be hearing a lot more from us prior to that date.

 

As I have said during our two previous Workday go-live events, there are three key things to remember about any new Workday ERP implementation:

1)    The new Workday Student system is far better than the old PeopleSoft system.  Most of you will not have a chance to experience this until MTP2 in March 2023, but once you begin using the new system and get used to it, it will become very clear very quickly.  That being said,

2)    Something will go wrong.  Guaranteed.  The Workday Student launch will not be perfect.  We have tested the new Workday system extensively for many months, but inevitably with a system conversion of this size, something will be missed, and something will be wrong.  So if some needed functionality isn't working, we will make note of it, and then

3)    We will fix it.

If you do find something that is wrong and contact your colleagues to fix it, in keeping with our Jesuit heritage, I would ask three things:

1)    Be kind.  Your colleagues put in extraordinarily long hours these last weeks (and weekends) to get Workday Student ready for launch and are pretty worn out.  Being nice will go a long way and will be very appreciated.

2)    Be patient.  Seemingly small issues may in fact be complicated to fix.  We may not be able to solve every issue on the spot.  We will resolve the issues that we know about as quickly as possible.

3)    Assume good will.  We did our best to get this right.  We have conducted exhaustive testing over the last 15 months to try and make sure that everything is right, but as noted above, the new Workday Student system will not be perfect at go-live.

I wish to express my heartfelt thanks to the many employees in the Provost's Office, the Registrar's Office, the Bursar's Office, the Drahmann Advising Center, Financial Aid, Admissions, the OneStop Center, the Graduate Offices, HR, Finance, and Information Services who worked very hard to make this day a reality.