Student Sunrise is ramping up work with our campus technology partners to integrate, or connect, 80+ WashU systems with Workday Student. The project’s integrations approach will ensure that WashU’s systems will be ready to exchange data with Workday Student when we launch our academic process functionality in AY 2024-25.
“A considerable amount of pre-planning has gone into scheduling our integrations work,” said Michael Coffman, technical director for Student Sunrise. “Engaging our technology partners earlier in this project will help them understand and absorb the changes, then allocate the time and resources needed to complete their integrations work on schedule.”
Over 80 WashU systems will require 240 integrations in total.* To tackle this effort, we’ve created an integrations development process based on four fundamentals:
- Learning – We’re discussing how some data types will be changing with Workday Student and how our partners may need to refactor, or update, their systems to exchange these data types.
- Collaboration – We’re working closely with our partners to meet the university’s data and academic process needs. This involves gathering our partners’ data requirements during a series of meetings. The product of these meetings is a design document that both teams will use to develop their side of the integration.
- Project Management Best Practices – We’re using just-in-time methodology to schedule our work. We’ve planned to have system integrations ready for end-to-end testing at least eight weeks prior to when we need them to exchange data with Workday Student. This will give us enough time to run test data through the integrations and make any necessary changes before the system’s academic functionality goes live.
- Transparency – We’re all working from the same playbook. Our campus technology partners will communicate their integration status weekly to compare against our schedule. If we’re not progressing as planned, we can proactively address any issues that may occur.
“There are many hands required to make each integration and system a success,” said Adam Ulrich, Student Sunrise Integrations lead. “Effective communication between the teams will be key to that success.”
*The number of integrations may fluctuate as we learn more during the project. All numbers in the article are as of Feb. 2, 2023.