Implementations Are Like Moving: Your Guide to a Smooth Workday® Student Homecoming

Implementing a new system can feel overwhelming, much like moving to a new home. The detailed work and planning required for a seamless transition mirror the process of implementing Workday Student or any ERP system.

Think back to your last move. You likely packed countless items, assessed each one, and decided their new place in your fresh surroundings. But this scenario applies equally to implementing an ERP system. Rather than simply relocating physical belongings, you're transferring critical data, workflows, and processes to a new system and building that new environment to accommodate them all.

As you embark on this implementation journey, envision your institution as a well-planned neighborhood, where each department functions like a unique house filled with essential furniture, decor, and organization.

Each Department: A House in Your Neighborhood

From the Financial Aid house to the Registrar house, every academic department and support office, like campus security and student affairs, needs its own space in this new neighborhood.

You wouldn’t just dump everything in a box and hope it lands in the right place. Each department’s data must be meticulously collected, designed, and arranged before it settles into the Workday Student environment.

Collaboration among homeowners—your team, faculty, and students—is essential. Together, you must ensure each house is comfortable and, most importantly, functional.

The Role of Implementation Partners

You’re not in this alone; much like hiring movers, you have the support of implementation partners. These professionals possess valuable experience and can help guide you through the complexities of implementation. They assist you in organizing, transporting, and integrating your data processes into your new ERP system.

They will provide checklists and strategies for crafting each specific “house” in your neighborhood. However, understand that implementation partners cannot handle everything for you.

For instance, you wouldn’t expect movers to decide which items from your kitchen to keep or organize family photos. These details? They fall to you and your institution. The same principle applies to your ERP implementation.

Your Responsibilities in the Move

Let’s explore some key responsibilities that belong to your institution during the implementation process:

1. Institutional Readiness

Consider the concept of institutional readiness. Before building your new neighborhood, the institution must consult with the residents to determine their needs for their new homes.

Assess your institution's readiness for the transformation that comes with implementing Workday Student. This involves carefully evaluating each department's internal processes that may require or depend on data access, as well as the overall culture's adaptability to change and adopt new processes.

Workday supports a process called the Customer Readiness Review (CRR). This misnomer, however, focuses on their product lines being implemented, not preparing departments to actually operate with Workday as the SIS.

2. Data Quality

Movers transport boxes. They do not take responsibility for what’s inside.

It is the implementation partner’s responsibility to ensure your data is received, formatted and uploaded into your new system correctly. It is not their job to ensure that data is accurate.

Consider how you declutter your belongings before a move. Ensuring your data is accurate and relevant is just as crucial.

Before transitioning to Workday, review and clean your data. For example, if you discover that 20% of student records contain errors, correct them to avoid complications later. Ask yourself: is what I’m moving worth taking to the new house?

As another example, poor data quality often results from unidentified policy exemptions in the legacy system. If unaccounted for, data reflecting policy exemptions in your legacy system will be rejected in Workday®. For instance, if a student in your legacy system has 5 credits for a 4-credit course, their registration will fail in Workday. To maintain data quality, all exemptions in the legacy system must be identified and addressed with Workday® workarounds.

3. Testing

After the move, you will need to focus on testing your new environment. Just as you would check that the lights, plumbing, and appliances work well in your new home, you must do the same for your ERP system.

Testing begins as you build. While partners provide tools to test system functionality, institutions are responsible for developing tests in-house to ensure their internal processes are accurately represented, enabling smooth operations across departments.

For instance, if seniors get priority registration, the institution must create a test scenario specifically for senior registration, even if the implementation partner provides general registration test scenarios. Similarly, if graduate students taking undergraduate classes are exempt from prerequisites, the institution must test that the system correctly applies this exemption automatically.

4. Reports & Integration

Think of reports as neatly labeled boxes that help you locate items in your new space. Structure your reports thoughtfully to ensure a smooth flow of data.

Partners provide standardized "look-up" reports with basic data lists to all schools. However, it falls on the institutions to identify departmental reporting needs (remember the Institutional Readiness conversation above?) and creating those reports with the required level of sophistication and data outputs.

To maintain operations, institutions will need to create reports that provide more than just standardized data lists. They need summaries, counts and totals, data averages (e.g. GPA), degree audits, and more. The best report writers are often cross-operational, techno-functional in-house users who keep things simple, have deep institutional knowledge and maximize what is already delivered in Workday. 

5. User Experience

User experience refers to how your faculty, staff and students navigate Workday to do their job or complete a task. 

Just like the design of roads and pathways influences a neighborhood's atmosphere, user experience in your ERP system affects how students and staff interact with it.

Your implementation partner is obligated to provide you with standardized Workday hubs. While a good starting point, these delivered interfaces require redundant clicks and circular steps to perform simple tasks. 

It is 100% the responsibility of the institution to design and build a smooth and intuitive flow to how tasks are presented and completed in Workday. Institutions with the highest user acceptance reviews, create user-group customized dashboards with intuitive layouts that guide users through task.

6. Training

Imagine moving into a new home without knowing how to operate the appliances. Training is crucial during implementation.

Workday training focuses on implementation, not on operational, day-to-day use. 

Training all user groups (faculty, staff, students) is 100% the responsibility of the institution. This includes the occasional student-user to  hands-on training of specialized staff like techno-functional users, Business Analysts, and report writers. Because these procedures are customized to the institution, the institution is responsible for carefully documenting them and developing coordinating training materials.

Moreover, implementing Workday Student marks a shift from traditional legacy systems and conventional methods of accessing data. In most legacy systems, only a limited number of offices usually have direct access to student data. Conversely, with Workday, everyone can obtain direct access. The extensive range of individuals requiring training is often underestimated in Workday Student implementations.

Implementation partners may provide sample job-aids or guides, but these are not specific to the institution and will not meet the demand.

7. Change Management

Change management is essential for bridging the gap between technology and people, ensuring successful adoption and alignment with organizational culture. It plays a crucial role in transformations, particularly digital ones, by addressing the human aspect of change. While technology enables potential efficiency and profitability, its success ultimately depends on how effectively people transition to and use new systems and processes.

Your Journey to a New ERP Neighborhood

Embarking on an ERP implementation journey is undeniably exciting yet daunting. By recognizing how moving parallels the implementation process, you can better address the challenges of adopting Workday Student.

Remember, that while you have the support of implementation partners, you should not expect them to do everything required for a successful move. The responsibility falls 100% on the institution.

Get Help for Your Workday Implementation

Moving an entire neighborhood while building the neighborhood is an incredible task. Legato Strategic Consulting can help an institution prepare for a new ERP implementation and walk alongside each step of the way by providing expertise in all the areas that fall on the institution.

Including:

• Training, Documentation and Change Management

• ERP Selection

• Institutional Readiness

• Quality Assurance support

• Strategic Operations consulting

• Post-production support

• and more

By combining technical expertise with a focus on people and processes, Legato Strategic Consulting ensures institutions are well-prepared for a smooth ERP transition, minimizing disruption and maximizing value.

Lastly, don't forget to reach out to brainstorm together. We love providing free discovery calls to support institutions as important moments of transformation. Request a discovery call to tell us a little more about your situation.

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