Wednesday, December 18, 2019

Anchovies, Antiques, and Implementations: Meet FST’s Workday Lead, Jackie Tucker

Jackie Tucker’s experience with implementing Workday at Yale made her a natural pick for the Finance Strategic Transformation team, but her perfect fit for the position goes beyond that experience. Tucker’s passion is working with teams to understand processes and problems, make improvements, and implement software that truly addresses needs.

For most of her career, she has worked with applications, holding IT and technical support roles, running data centers, overseeing network operations, and guiding hardware purchases. She’s overseen both the functional side and the application side of tech in business.

At Yale, she worked on many system implementations in a variety of projects and came to appreciate and enjoy the process of clarifying the business requirements for the software.

"I absolutely love the implementation phase of projects,” she says.

“I feel about implementations like some people feel about anchovies on pizza – they love the pizza, but not the anchovies. Implementations are like the anchovies on the pizza and I say bring them on!”

Tucker says the fulfillment she gets from implementations comes from the energizing and rewarding nature of working in a team environment, understanding business processes and working with teams to find solutions. 

“It’s not a one-sided process at all,” she states.

“You really have to listen and understand. There are so many different people to learn from on an implementation, and I like seeing the end result of that collaboration.”

Another bonus to system implementations, according to Tucker, is the unique opportunity organizations have to influence project design. UVA, she says, is perfectly positioned to help shape Workday product for higher education as a design partner.

“Workday encourages design partnerships. They are very committed to providing higher ed specific functionality. UVA can step right up to the plate and help influence product design.”

Although she’s only been in Charlottesville and on the job for a week, she has found people in the area kind and welcoming, and the UVAFinance team cohesive and welcoming.

The love of making improvements while honoring the past runs deep with Tucker: when she’s not implementing systems or helping to make business processes more efficient, she spends time refinishing antique furniture.

“I’m actually not very good at it and that’s what attracts me to it,” she laughs, but admits she’s getting better all the time.

“My latest project was a refinished bureau – it started out rough, but now it looks like something that I might buy in a store!”

If her career path is any indication of her love to delve into a project while understanding and respecting the past structure, there should be lots of pieces in our area antiques stores that could have a new, refurbished future ahead of them.
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