Planning to Support Users Across Workday Platforms

This week, VP for Finance Melody Bianchetto, VP and Chief Information Officer Virginia Evans, and Interim Chief Human Resources Officer John Kosky participated in a retreat to continue high-level discussions of the future Workday support model UVA will adopt when Workday is in use for both human resources and finance. These ongoing conversations are part of the Finance Strategic Transformation (FST) project and are facilitated by Jim Kemp from Deloitte, the project consulting partner, and FST Managing Director James Gorman.

These retreats’ main objective is for the participants to agree on a conceptual organizational structure for the cross-platform support (CPS) model. This means that participants discuss what the approach could be in the future to support users across the different Workday platforms at the university, as well as what the roles and responsibilities will be of the different groups providing support. At this point, the parties involved are still in the information gathering stage. Earlier this year, FST team members completed interviews with peer organizations about their experience with support model implementations. Now, in the retreat sessions, leaders are delving into UVA’s current practices—what’s happening and who’s doing what.

Here are the key topics being discussed:

• Main support functions currently performed 
• Definitions of each responsibility area/function
• Coordination level required among functional groups
• Details related to specific support functions, including the following:
• End-User Support
• Incident Management
• Project Management
• Reporting and Analytics Support
• Tenant/Release Management
• Configurations
• System fixes

Another retreat with the same participants will take place near the end of May to refine the high-level strategy. A workshop involving key leaders from Finance, HR, and ITS will then meet in early June to explore these topics in more detail. From there, predetermined workgroups will collaborate to create the support model that has been conceptualized.

The current goal is to have a prototype version of the support model actualized in advance of the Workday Financials go-live on July 1, 2022, so there will be a period when it is run as a pilot to test it and assess its effectiveness prior to full-scale implementation at go-live.