First of four sessions to involve campus partners
Change is hard. People fear the unknown.
That’s why an important goal of the Student Sunrise project is to understand the myriad changes, large and small, that will come with the implementation of Workday Student and to help schools and units prepare for those changes.
One of the ways the project team will accomplish this is through “change impact validation sessions” with invited partners across campus. These change impact sessions will ensure the project team understands the effects of changes on key stakeholder groups like faculty, advisors, registrars and students.
“Our Steering Committee representatives, school IT advisors and campus team members play an essential role in both identifying and managing changes,” said Ellen Rostand, assistant vice chancellor and Student Sunrise change director. “Initiatives like these are inevitably bumpy. But by working with project partners, we can ensure we are correctly anticipating changes and the support needed.”
What is a change impact session?
Throughout the project, the Student Sunrise team is tracking changes anticipated from the transition to Workday Student. At regular intervals throughout the implementation, Student Sunrise team members will meet with partners across campus who are already engaged in the project. These partners, including IT leaders, members of the project steering committee and members of the campus teams from the schools and academic units, will help us to understand and assess the impact of key changes on culture, people, roles, processes, policies and systems.
The goal is to give our schools, academic units and the university a consolidated picture of what’s changing, for whom and why. Feedback from these sessions will inform plans for future communications, system preview events, training and other go-live preparations, through which we’ll share details of the changes broadly with campus.
When will these sessions be held?
Our campus partners will be asked to attend change impact sessions at four times throughout the project, with the first round scheduled to happen this summer.
Each session will cover new changes discovered as we configure more of Workday Student.
How will these sessions work?
Each session will feature a list of important changes identified by the Student Sunrise project team.
Campus partners will be asked to weigh in on how they and their teams will be affected by each change in their area, and what effect that change is expected to have. We will ask them to consider a number of criteria including stakeholder groups impacted, number of people affected, degree of complexity, shifts of work, and general receptivity to the change.
What kind of changes will be included?
Changes are gathered through meetings with the project team, campus teams and other engagement with stakeholders. Change impacts have been categorized into one or more types of changes.
The types of changes we will consider are:
- Changes to a process that either introduces a new process or changes an existing process. This may include approval routing or additional inputs/outputs generated that affect the way the process is completed.
- Changes to a WashU policy or a policy specific to a school or unit. Additionally, these may include legal or regulatory impact to the university.
- Changes to the way work is conducted at WashU. This may include shifts in work, including transitions from manual to automated processes.
- Changes to someone’s responsibilities. This could require a new skillset to complete the responsibility.
- Changes to systems beyond Workday, such as how data flows between systems or which systems serve as the system of record (source of truth) for various data points.
Looking forward
These change impact sessions are integral for the Student Sunrise team in planning how we manage the impact of the changes. For example, will communications and training be sufficient, or will we need additional strategies? Will a unified approach work for a specific impacted group, such as advisors or students, or will the approach need to be tailored to the needs of each school or unit?
View a list of individuals currently engaged from your school or unit »