We tend to talk about going live with Workday as a culminating, final “go-live” milestone that will happen over winter break, but that’s only just the beginning.
The first people to officially use Workday will be those on campus who enter their daily hours into the Hub. This will happen in mid-December. At the moment we open up Workday for this function, we will officially be ‘live’ with Workday.
January 1 we will open up a larger bundle of Workday functionality to all Carleton faculty and staff, as well as to students who are student employees or manage a Carleton Student Association (CSA) organization. This bundle will include budget reports for budget managers, requesting and maintaining leave requests, etc.
Other functions will move to Workday at various times during the year.
As President Byerly shared during her comments at the August Quarterly Staff meeting, we will need to pace ourselves through the marathon ahead.
When we talk about ‘going live,’ what we really mean is that Workday IS ALIVE at Carleton. We’ve planted our feet in the Workday world. Planting our feet somewhere doesn’t always mean we are done growing; instead, it means we can do what we need to do, at least in some basic fashion. We planted our feet in our current system, the Colleague world, almost 30 years ago, and we have had several decades to make changes and upgrades, to acclimate ourselves to Colleague and to acclimate Colleague to Carleton.
Workday has functionality that will allow us to grow even more than we did with Colleague, such as notifications and a powerful workflow engine, but it will take time for us to grow into that functionality. We will have enhancements that we want to do beyond what we will be able to do when we first go live. In addition, Workday will regularly release new functionality with the potential to help us improve what we do.
Our journey will continue at each “go-live” milestone we experience over the next two years. From there, we plan to continue beyond each of those starting points, continually looking for feedback from our community, working on projects that we didn’t get to during implementation, and exploring new features as they become available.