In April, we wrapped up the first stage of WashU’s configuration of Workday Student. Now we’re looking ahead to the second stage. We have organized our Workday Student configuration work into four, six-month worksets. Workset A concluded in April and Workset B began in May. Both pave the way for what needs to be accomplished in worksets C and D. Together, these four worksets are referred to as the Architect, Configure and Prototype stage of the implementation.
“While Workset B represents a deeper focus on key configurations in all areas of the system, the team will concentrate its work on designing and configuring processes around advising and registration,” said Erin Culbreth, associate provost and executive director of the Student Sunrise project. “The further we get into the project, the more we will understand how things will work and what changes we will need to manage before and after we go live.”
Building on successes from Workset A
During Workset A, we began laying the foundation for how Workday Student will work at WashU. That foundation included things like academic unit structure and academic calendars.
These basics are necessary to put in place before we can configure familiar day-to-day academic processes. For example, registering for classes and financial aid disbursement are both tied to our academic calendar.
A look at Workset B
We have started to configure more complex processes, with a large focus on curriculum and advising. One large effort is standardizing how we number courses.
We will also be working on:
- Defining advisor types
- Collecting academic requirements students need to complete a program of study (required courses, minimum course hours, etc.)
- Designing the student onboarding process
- Designing the registration process
- Creating policies for enrollment access, grading and waitlists
Integration design will also be front and center during this workset. We anticipate 83 of our 147 current student systems can be replaced with Workday or another solution. We anticipate approximately 80 core SIS and other student systems will need to integrate with Workday. We are prioritizing integration development based on what is most critical for the system to launch, the complexity of the integration (more complex will begin earlier), and when campus and project resources will be available.
Campus partnerships
We continue to receive feedback from our campus partners. This feedback helps ensure we are building a system that will be useful to them.
At the end of each workset, the project team discusses any documented changes to how we operate today and how those changes will affect different populations across WashU (e.g. students, advisors, instructors). These change impact validation sessions are held with campus teams, as well as leaders from schools and units.
In addition to our Faculty Advisory Group, which we convened this spring, we recently launched a Communications Advisory Group. This group will help us reach students, faculty and staff within their specific schools and units by providing support and advice on the best channels. This group will also develop plans to ensure changes that result from the project are reflected in messaging, websites and elsewhere.