It’s a new month and time for a new IT blog post. With the Workday Project about to start it’s worth talking about the project some more. To remind you, we start the Workday project in April and plan to have HR and Finance running for the start of 2027 with the student piece finished in 2028.

This week, the Star Tribune published an article on Minnesota State’s ongoing Workday implementation, which is significantly over budget and behind schedule. It’s hard to compare Augsburg to a 33 school system with 270,000 students and 14,000 employees, but the article raised some common concerns that are worth addressing in the context of our implementation project. 

People Resources

The challenge all schools face with a project like this is that we need our best staff building the future in Workday but the school still needs to keep running on the old system. The typical approach is to plan for a “backfill” of the daily work that was being done by our best people who will now be spending several or many hours a week building our future. We started our backfill planning last year and have a plan that we continue to refine as we go along.

Project Scope and Deadlines

One concern we heard from other schools is that more pieces of the software were planned to be functional at launch than were ultimately possible to do in the time available. This is very common with these projects. When planning what pieces of a system are running at launch, it’s important to focus on the pieces that are essential at the time and plan to build other pieces later on. For example, we are launching Workday in January. Open Enrollment, when employees choose their health care plans, happens in November. So we are not planning to have Open Enrollment set up in January but will set it up later in the year. Our implementation partner, Avaap, is planning a reasonable scope and has successfully brought 48 customers live on HR and Finance. So I am confident we’re not biting off more than we can chew.

Change Management and Training

Change is hard. Doing things differently is hard. So we’re planning on having a strong focus on change management and training.  This means focusing on the human side of change, ensuring people are prepared, supported, and equipped to adopt new processes or technologies. Change management is also a main focus of our implementation partner, Avaap, who has a defined change management approach as part of their project methodology. At Augsburg, we have a designated person, Jim Matthias, who is leading our change management along with a change team that represents staff, faculty and students. While we haven’t identified the specific members of the change team, besides Jim, we know the roles of the people who we will assemble for the team. If you look at Macalester’s Workday Change Management team you’ll get an idea of what that team can look like.

Looking Ahead

This Workday project is both an exciting project that will transform and improve how faculty, staff and students interact with Augsburg and it will be a challenging project. This is a once-a-generation project. We have been on Unit4(Agresso) since 2003. We are expecting there will be surprises and are planning for the unexpected. With an experienced partner like Avaap helping us, we have high confidence that we will successfully get to that better future state. As always, I’m happy to answer any questions about the project at krajewsk@augsburg.edu.