Workday Wiz Joins FST Team as Technical Lead

Sharad Gupta

Sharad Gupta started in April as the Finance Strategic Transformation (FST) Technical Workstream Lead. Gupta brings years of Workday experience with him, which will be essential in this role. Since 2012, his sole focus has been Workday, and he’s been doing IT-related work for 30 years.

Prior to coming to UVA, Gupta was a Global Workday Architect for IBM, responsible for implementations impacting more than 100,000 employees.  Additionally, he worked for Deloitte, UVA’s consulting partner for the project, in 2014 as a Senior Manager of Workday Practice. Gupta is certified in Workday Finance, HCM (HR/Payroll), Project Management, and Integration.

This opportunity at UVA enabled Gupta to pursue his interest to work in higher education again. He previously worked in the university environment on PeopleSoft projects at the University of Michigan and the University of Rochester. According to Gupta, many universities are transitioning from applications like PeopleSoft to cloud-based technology such as Workday, so UVA is in good company. 

Gupta says, “I like challenging roles where I can learn something new and apply my past experience.”

To get started, Gupta explains that he’ll be gathering information to understand the current tech landscape for UVA’s finance system. Once he has a firm grasp of the current situation, he’ll lead his team to handle everything from creating the UVA Workday Financials environment to integrations, reporting, and the Security workstream.

“We want to make sure everything is going to work well and welcome the challenges along the way,” says Gupta. “I enjoy coming up with creative solutions.”

Gupta has traveled throughout the world for work, and he likes traveling to new places. He’s been to more than 40 countries. Gupta’s favorites are Switzerland and France, where he lived for almost four years. They were the first places to which he traveled internationally.