The monthly Change Partner meeting on April 15, featured a special update from Shauna King, executive sponsor of the Workday@Yale program, and testimonials from User Acceptance Testing (UAT) participants.
A chance to make a lasting impact
A system implementation like Workday is a once-in-a-decade opportunity to make improvements in Yale’s human resources, payroll, and financial systems. The Change Partners have been key participants in sharing information and supporting the transition to Workday on the unit level.
Shauna King emphasized that the Workday project has been intentionally structured to engage the end-user community—to do this “together”— in a variety of ways. Shauna encouraged the Change Partners to continue their good work and reminded them that they too, were owners of the outcomes. “It is a hugely important role that we’ve asked you to play and it is the role of an owner. You are deploying Workday. We are all deploying Workday,” she added. Shauna echoed the UAT participant experiences with Workday—search capability, data at one’s fingertips, and the ease with which to retrieve and share information.
First-hand experience
Some of the Change Partners who attended UAT included Sonja Beamon-Rezendes, Administration; Jennifer Mulligan, Dermatology; Denise Krause, University Library; Kyleen Kolomick, Human Resources; Ian Solomon, Internal Medicine; and Will Walker, Forestry. They enthusiastically shared their testing experience with Workday, noting its overall user-friendliness and intuitive and modern functionality:
- Transparent business processes: there is visibility into the process; one can see who takes the next step in the transaction—no more guesswork—and its status in real time.
- Dashboards and Reporting: human resource generalists, human resources staff, lead administrators and operations managers can access dashboards and drill down into data. In an FTE report, one can now see who is included as part-time and full-time employees. One can run reports—trends over years, diversity data, turnover metrics, number of faculty or post doc fellows— and get results in seconds rather than days.
- Flexibility: to change compensation for an employee, one can search for the employee first and then click the process, or start the process and then search for the employee.
- Serving faculty: information regarding faculty appointments and term end-dates is easy to view and easier to share with faculty when they request it.
- Training guides: the guides are very helpful, but the system is so easy to use, they aren’t necessary for long.
With the many people, teams, and groups working hard to ensure that Workday is ready for go-live on July 1, the promise of a new workday will soon become reality.
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