Last month we officially started the project. It’s been a gradual ramping up and things will continue to ramp up as the year moves forward. Our weekly meetings with our implementation partner Avaap have begun and more meetings are coming. Here’s what’s happening and coming in general terms.
First, who is Avaap?
Avaap is called our implementation provider. If you think of moving to Workday like moving to a new house, Avaap are our movers. That’s a bit oversimplified but they are helping us move to Workday. They bring a lot of experience with Workday and higher education. For example:
- They have successfully helped 48 schools implement Workday Finance and HCM.
- They have successfully helped 5 schools implement Workday Student.
- They have 29 schools in the process of implementing Workday Finance and HCM.
- They have 12 schools in the process of implementing Workday Student.
- Their student implementation team come from higher education – an average of 22 years of higher education experience. Their staff are former registrars, advisors, admissions counselors and so on.
Our Steering Committee was impressed by their AvaapOne implementation methodology and their staff and felt Avaap was the best option for Augsburg to be successful in a move to Workday.
Training
Staff in HR, Finance and IT are taking training provided by Workday. These are both videos and instructor-led classes. As of May 6, 295 hours of training have been done by our staff with many more to do. So if you noticed that HR has been closed or you get an email bounceback from one of the staff in administrative accounting, now you know why.
Change Management
There are two main areas of change management underway. The work of change management is to help us as an organization weather this huge change and especially help our people weather the change. There is also a Change Management team forming that will shape our change strategy and change plan. Change management will be going on throughout this process all the way to 2028. But more on that in future months.
Road to Ready
In late May and June Avaap will be guiding our staff working on the Workday project through a series of workshops to help us refine why we’re doing this project, how we’ll get through it, and what our success metrics will be.
Student Preparedness
Even though the student phase doesn’t start until October, there is preparation to be done before then. In May and June many of the major student-serving parts of campus will participate in sessions which will help Avaap understand what our current student experience is from application to graduation — as well as what our academic policies are. These 16 meetings will cover topics that match up with Workday’s 8 major areas of the student module.
Configuring Workday
Based on the project plan, once we hit the end of June our staff will begin configuring Workday to match up with our policies and procedures. Since Workday is a cloud system, we can’t customize or change Workday. We only can configure it using the tools provided. This helps us align with industry-standard ways of doing HR and Finance.
Testing Workday
September though November will be the time when our staff will be testing all the work they did in the previous phase. This is a critical phase to ensure everything is working as we have intended, and if not, we can correct it.
Deployment
Once we are in November through January we will be doing the final data conversions and have the actual cutover (date TBD at the time writing this). This will mark the cutover to a new Finance and Human Resources system. The student piece will continue to be worked on through 2028!