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!

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.

Hello Augsburg students, faculty, and staff,

Over the next 4–5 years, Augsburg will be changing its primary information system (called Unit4 or formerly Agresso). This change will involve moving from our current campus-based Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system with numerous third-party systems to a unified, cloud-based ERP system. 

This is a complex, multi-year, campus-wide project that involves how we manage student records, registration, human resources, finances, and more. Simply put, how you interact with Augsburg as a student or employee will be changing and improving once we have made the change. How you register for classes, record time worked and time off, submit grades for your courses, and so on—all will be modernized and, ideally, improved.

Such a change can be both exciting and daunting for people so we intend to support you in this transition with plenty of information, communication, and campus engagement as the project moves forward. The first steps will be to document business processes and engage key functional areas in preparation for campus visits by potential vendors this spring. 

On the project web page you’ll find information on project timeline, decision process, and project goals. That project page will grow and expand over time. If you have any questions about the project please feel free to reach out to me at any time.

– Scott Krajewski ’94, ’21 MBA
AVP for IT