As Carleton wraps up nearly three years of effort to implement Workday, the project sponsors would like to invite the campus community to join a celebration on Thursday, May 30, from 3 – 4 p.m. outside of Sayles. There will be brief remarks at 3:15 p.m. Please join us if you can!
This project has been a tremendous effort — for the campus community and the implementation team alike — and though at times it has been difficult, there is also a great deal to celebrate.
First, Carleton is now using modern, cloud-based software that will get regular updates.
Second, the project team did a tremendous job migrating our data, configuring the environment to match our practices, writing reports to view our data, and writing integrations from Workday to/from other systems, such as Slate and Advance.
Third, our community took advantage of training and support materials, asked excellent questions, experimented, and helped each other learn how to be successful in this new environment.
Both the HR & Finance rollout and the registration & advising rollout had challenges, including concerns about how our unique needs were mapping to this new software. Along the way, we listened to feedback carefully, developed custom dashboards to aggregate useful information, and invested in additional consultant time to try to meet Carleton’s needs.
The project team had also anticipated that we would need to be able to make changes to Workday beyond what the platform normally accommodates, purchasing the Workday Extend module which will allow us, among other things, to create a customized version of the Course Section Search before Fall Term.
Back in 2021, when Eric Runestad and Art Rodriguez announced the project, they concluded their remarks by saying:
“This project will be challenging, and will require extensive partnerships and commitment across the institution in order to be planned, implemented, and sustained. Fortunately, tackling and solving highly complex problems like this, with a strong and honest spirit of collaboration, is something at which Carleton has excelled over time. We intend to demonstrate that once again through SEAMS.”
And, indeed, all of that has turned out to be true. Thank you to everyone who has been involved in the implementation! And thank you to everyone who has learned a new system! All of you have shown great patience and great support for each other. Well done, Carleton.
