Campus team members had an opportunity to explore Workday as part of a system testing event held on Feb 16. This was the first of three planned campus team events to test different types of functionality in the new system.
“Campus team members are the ideal testers because they’ve spent two years helping inform the design and configuration of our new student information system,” said Mecca Baker, academic process lead for Student Sunrise.
The Student Sunrise project team has already completed two years of different kinds of system testing.
Getting “hands on” in Workday
The Feb. 16 testing event focused on functionality that will be turned on in Workday in September 2024, including course and course section management. To prepare, campus team members were asked to bring their own course and course section information for review and testing.
At the event, campus team members experienced Workday Student for the first time as they tested alongside their school and unit colleagues with real student data in a draft version of the system. They used test scenarios they had vetted prior to the event and entered their own course data into the system to perform tasks and run business processes. The Sunrise team supported and guided them throughout the event by demonstrating how to navigate the system and perform tasks.
“It was nice to finally be hands on in the system, and I appreciated the help and follow-up that Student Sunrise provided throughout each exercise,” said Danielle Gross, manager, project curriculum, Division of Biology & Biomedical Sciences. “I thought searching for courses was straightforward and simple. But going through the steps to build courses was a bit more challenging. I realize this was my first time doing it, and I know that I’ll need to practice until it becomes routine.”
Running tasks & business processes
Some of the curriculum management tasks the group performed included creating and editing courses and course sections and finding course sections to overlap. As they tested, they logged any issues they thought they might encounter in the system, such as business process approvals going to the wrong person, functionality not working as expected, or inaccurate security based on future system tasks.
While testers didn’t experience any issues with business process or design functionality, they did find some data-related issues that are being corrected or that will resolve as the system rolls out. For example, student housing data was missing during testing because Workday has yet to be integrated with StarRez, the system that contains housing data.
Other issues were due to Workday-specific navigation techniques or task-specific data-entry requirements, such as having to enter data in fields in the order they appear on screen. Surfacing these types of challenges now will help inform training.
Testers also submitted requests for enhancements. For example, after running a report at the event, a tester requested a report filter to see whether their students were in an online or in-person program. In response, Sunrise has added a Program Area filter to the report to produce that information.
“This was a great opportunity for future users to get a personal preview of the new system,” Baker added. “With this preview, we expected a variety of issues would be identified by this group. It’s why we test—to gather insights we can use to improve the system and training materials for go-live.”
More testing to come
The next two campus teams testing events are planned for May and June. In May, the group will test advising functionality, while the June event will focus on academic requirement overrides and administrative registration testing. Sunrise is preparing for these events by testing this functionality in the system and creating new tasks and processes for campus team members to test.