People, Process, Technology (in that order) - Maximizing Your Technology Investment

In this day of configurable systems, those who have not focused on the people and process FIRST will not get the return on investment of that new technology.

When organizations move to a new technology, the focus is often on that technology and the specifics to implement it. I've seen this in many projects, including ones in higher education for Workday® Student, Slate, and Symplicity. Unfortunately, I've seen projects falter and institutions struggle to adapt when the focus moves away from people and process first.

Here's the why:

1. People

You must focus on the user experience.

To allow for this, a lot of systems these days are fairly configurable. In fact, in Workday®, you can reduce the number of clicks it takes to get to things by building more custom reports that you update each year.

Many places would opt to use more delivered functionality and make the users selecting fields every time they run a report (e.g. Academic Period). But many schools' list of Academic Periods, in systems like Workday®, are very long. In less than an hour, you can configure your reports with pre-selected fields, like Academic Periods, to save you time. This investment can pay huge dividends in making the system more intuitive for users.

User experience is also improved through custom dashboards. By making custom dashboards for each office in Workday®, instead of having them use the search bar and have to remember their reports and tasks, you're going to drive people to use the system more because it's easy.

Additionally, providing well-done guides and documentation for ALL users goes a long way. If people don't feel the system is easy to use and saves them time, you will get a number of people still running their own shadow systems (even if it's an Excel spreadsheet on their computer or sticky notes on a desk) undermining the value and quality of the system's data.

2. Process

If you don't take the time to figure out what you want your processes to be in a future state BEFORE implementing your technology, the new technology will be pretty much like the old one. For example, if you have complex rules for Academic Standing before implementing a system like Workday®, then you will not see any improvements after implementing Workday®.

In fact, if you simply copy and paste old processes into a new system, your processes may become inferior to what you had before implementation and work-arounds will be required.

Avoid this by documenting each office's key activities in both a written format and a workflow format. then, ask yourselves hard questions. Is a complex Academic Standing policy really helping your institution meet its strategic goals? Where can the administrative workload be reduced so that efforts can be shifted to other priorities more important to the institution?

3. Technology

This is the third item in the list. It may be the catalyst to do the other work in this list, but it still comes last in the priority. Technology, by itself, is not a solution.

Protect your Investment in Technology

We recognize that Workday® Student is the most complicated Workday® module and the higher education institution is a very complex organization. Additionally, aligning the institution's people and process requirements with the technological capabilities and restrictions of Workday® Student is an arduous task, like climbing Mt. Everest.

For this reason, strongly consider enlisting an independent guide to take you up the mountain, so to speak. Our team at Legato Strategic Consulting provides independent, unbiased, support and guidance to teams taking on this challenge. We meet teams where they are - doing the heavy lifting to the very top or simply pointing out the way for you to take the trek on your own.

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