The Student Sunrise project continues to engage WashU’s schools and academic units in preparation for the Workday Student implementation kickoff in fall 2021.
“After nearly a year of discovery work to understand how we operate today, we’ve identified additional areas to explore ahead of the Workday Student implementation,” said Erin Culbreth, executive director for the Student Sunrise project. “Over the next few months, we’ll engage members of the campus community to further investigate critical processes, policies, terminology, and system functionality. We’ll also use this time to hire the project team and continue technical work to get our data ready to build our initial draft of the Workday Student system.”
Student Sunrise campus teams
While most work will be accomplished within the Student Sunrise project team, engagement with campus over the life of the project is necessary. The Student Sunrise project will bring in subject matter experts from the schools and academic units at different points to help with several key areas, including system design, data conversion, system testing, training development, and more.
“Some engagements may only require a survey, conversation, or small group meeting. Others will involve longer partnerships in the form of campus teams,” said Beth Lee, who serves as a project director and oversees the functional side of the project. “In addition to contributing to the system implementation work, campus teams will serve as project champions to help each school adopt the new system and associated processes.”
Over the next few months, the Student Sunrise project team will work with several campus teams to complete a thorough analysis of a few targeted areas. Current campus teams include:
- Good Standing and Satisfactory Academic Progress (started in February): Satisfactory Academic Progress (SAP) can be thought of in two ways: SAP requirements for Title IV aid eligibility and SAP that keeps a student in good standing at the university. This campus team is exploring how WashU’s schools manage and track both types of SAP.
- PhD Student Process (started in February): This campus team focuses on understanding the processes that support the education of our PhD students, including making and sourcing payments to PhD students and tracking completion of PhD program elements, like MTE/MPEs and dissertation processes.
- Advising: The Advising Campus Team will analyze the diverse advising functions across the university. Their work includes inventorying advisor typologies at the university, recommending note-taking and record access policies, and evaluating tools to enhance Workday’s advising functionality.
- Degree Audit: This team will lay the groundwork to implement Workday’s degree audit functionality by compiling an inventory of degree requirements across all academic programs and developing a degree audit template for schools to collect and organize degree requirement data.
- Curricular Tools: The Curricular Tools Campus Team will evaluate Workday’s functionality to support course creation, governance, planning, scheduling, and classroom management and recommend a software solution to support these needs.
The Student Sunrise project will engage additional campus teams as needed throughout the Workday Student implementation.
Recent decisions
The Student Sunrise project’s governance teams, with the input from campus teams and other advising groups, will make decisions throughout the project regarding scope, system design, project priorities, and risks. These groups also will work with the schools and academic units to update policies, processes, and terminology. Below are a few recent decisions.
- The Board of Trustees approved the case for the transition to Workday Student, securing initial funding for the project.
- The project’s Executive Committee approved the formation of an IT leaders advisory group. The group is comprised of IT leads from the schools, as well as from major units that will be impacted by the transition to Workday Student. The group will advise on the project’s technical front and help prepare the community for changes as we approach go-live.
- We will adopt Workday Student’s tools for advising, academic planning, and degree auditing, which will replace 35+ tools currently used across the university. In addition to supporting the processes and functionality of our legacy tools in a single system, Workday Student Advising will aggregate data, notes, and reporting across campus, while reducing the cost and complexity of maintaining multiple systems.
Key project decisions and outcomes from campus team work will be shared on this website and in the project’s newsletter, as well as at departmental meetings. If you have specific questions, please reach out to the Student Steering Committee member for your area or complete this contact form.