Path to go live

The User Readiness Review is currently in progress in preparation for the faculty training sessions commencing the week of April 29th. Participants are actively reviewing the training curriculum, which will be distributed to all employees at Union College. Training sessions will be organized by department, with the expectation that all employees will receive training by the go-live date set for July 1st.

End-to-End testing started today. End-to-end testing focuses on functional configurations and business processes and how they work seamlessly in the system. This testing phase examines all components of complete Workday business transactions, such as hiring to retiring, benefits processing, employee DIY, procurement etc.

We are conducting Customer Confirmation Sessions January 16-19, 2024. Union College Functional Leads are providing demonstrations of the business processes they have been working to configure during the Architect and Configure stage that was completed in December 2023. These sessions are not training sessions and are not meant for discussing redesigns. They are also not considered formal testing time nor will this be the time to validate data.

Feedback will be provided to the leads and the Change Management Team will use the feedback to inform their work on developing training and support materials.

The Change Agent Network monthly meeting was held today. Members were provided with a demo of the Do It Yourself (DIY) functionality of Workday. The Critical Path for the Workday 4 U project was reviewed and an overview of ADKAR (Change Management Approach) was provided. The team then discussed the key messages around what systems are being replaced by Workday

The project team has begun "unit testing" within their respective areas. Unit testing means making sure each step in a business process works as intended.

The project team met with the Chairs and Directors group today. An overview of the Workday 4 U Project was provided along with a demo of the Workday Worker Profile. The project team will be attending future Chairs and Directors meetings to provide updates and gather feedback as the project progresses.

The kick-off meeting of the Change Agent Network was held today. Members were provided an overview of the Workday 4 U Project along with information about their roles and responsibilities as a Change Agent. A demo of the Workday Worker Profile was provided along with next steps.

Today and tomorrow we are holding stakeholder interview sessions around change readiness. The feedback will help the Change Management Team in their planning around communications, training and support to help the transition to Workday be as smooth as possible. The Change Management Team met with members from the following areas:

• Academic Affairs
• Administrative Assistants (Academic Affairs)
• Administrative Systems Advisory Committee
• Athletics
• Campus Safety
• Chief Diversity Officers
• Dining Services
• Facilities Services
• Faculty Executive Committee
• Finance
• Human Resources
• ITS
• Liaison Committee for Academic Computing and Technology
• Student Affairs
• Union Staff Council

Starting this week, each workstream is conducting a "playback" session where they are reviewing the decisions they have made so far and providing a demo, if available, on how those decisions will function in Workday.

Informed the campus that we are conducting a readiness survey. The focus of the survey will involve questions like, What have you heard about Workday? What has been your experience when a change has occurred at Union College? Survey responses will help us determine how to best prepare the College for our transition to Workday.

We have completed our Plan Phase! This week we kicked off our Architect and Configure phase with the transition to our Foundation Tenant and our Garnet team is busy validating the information we have loaded.

We have completed our Business Process Alignment phase and have kicked off our Plan phase. We will be working on understanding Workday and how to address the issues identified in our Business Process Alignment phase.

We are kicking off the Business Process Alignment phase! We will be spending time discussing how we currently execute the various business processes in Payroll, HR and Finance, We will also identify issues we'd like to address as we move to Workday. All this information is the foundation for the Plan phase where we will be working on designing how things will work in Workday.

The College has selected Accenture as our Workday implementation partner. Planning and preparation meetings will begin with a target of kicking off the first phase in May 2023.

The College has selected, and the Trustees have approved, Workday as the vendor to replace our ERP system. We have a signed contract, and work will begin immediately with the intent to Go Live on July 1, 2024.