UVAFinance

Thursday, February 24, 2022

FST Update: February 24, 2022

No time to read all the text? Check out Five things to Know about FST

Or listen in to WFST, the FST Radio News Broadcast

Security Role Mapping (Workflow Control & Approvals)

The Security
Role mapping sprint is working toward a March 11 deadline to submit a draft of
the workday security role assignments in their respective schools and
units. The group often meets up to three
times per week to compare current oracle processes and roles to map them to the
processes and roles we’ll use in Workday. Security
role mapping, or Workflow Control and approvals as you may sometimes hear it
referred to, is all about getting the right people in the right roles so that when
it comes time for training, we’ll know exactly who needs which role-based
training.

Get the full story on the blog.

Training

The specific roles you’ll
play within Workday Financials will determine what courses you will complete as
we approach July 1, 2022, and it’s the training team’s goal to make sure you’re
able to perform your work upon go-live. They will offer self-paced, online
training that folks can take at their own convenience, as well as instructor-led training offered virtually and supplemented with in-person as needed. We’re also working on Quick Reference Guides, and the training team will also hold
office hours after go-live to address your questions.

User Experience Review is kicking off!

Over 300 folks from across Grounds will jump into the pool to review the Workday tenant as it is now. With end-to-end testing wrapped, these users will be taking the system for a spin and using the training team's QRGs (Quick Reference Guides) to complete tasks in the system. We appreciate their assistance!

Notes from your friendly neighborhood LSP: Softphone Rollout

UVAFinance is transitioning from physical desk phones to virtual phones, otherwise known as Webex softphones. This will allow you to answer your UVA work phone number using your laptop from any location you are working.

All physical phones are being removed. If you believe you have a business need for a physical phone, please contact vpf-support@virginia.edu. We will work with your supervisor to determine the best solution.

Please see the Using the UVA Softphone (Cisco Webex) App section on the ITS page https://in.virginia.edu/softphonefor helpful resources and instructions.

If you already have the Webex app on your cell phone you may continue to use it in addition to the desktop version being rolled out.

The Webex softphone rollout will occur by department over the next month. We will enroll all staff members into the new program and then provide further technical instructions on the steps required to complete the transition.

If you have questions, please reach out to us at vpf-support@virginia.edu.

UVAFinance: Make plans to attend the Spring Fling!

We’re having a fling! No, not that kind of fling.

The UVAFinance Spring Fling will be held on April 27, 2022. The biennial, in-person event is an opportunity to gather with our colleagues to share news and celebrate our accomplishments.

The schedule for the day will be shared closer to the event, but plan on meetings throughout the day and a lunch social with maybe a surprise or two. As plans are finalized, information will be shared through the Outlook calendar invitation you already have and through the blog digest.

Need hotel accommodations? The Travel Contracts page lists local hotels that provide discounts. When booking, make sure to indicate you are booking under the UVA contract to obtain the discount.

Contributed by Mark Anderson

The Reporting & Analytics
workstream has been working hard to get necessary reporting functionalities
ready for go-live.

On the Workday front, we have
developed well over 200 custom reports. We will address another 75 reporting
user stories before July 1st. These numbers will continue to fluctuate as we
get feedback from E2E and UER testing.

Over the past few months, we
have been sharing reports and getting feedback from a small group of users from
schools and units. As a result of this group’s engagement, we recently
communicated that we would augment Workday’s native reporting with a number of UBI
applications/reports. This decision was made after carefully considering users’
need for more flexibility and self-service customization of reports than we can
support in Workday itself. By utilizing a suite of solutions leveraging Workday,
Adaptive, and UBI, different reporting capabilities will provide various tools for
you depending on your needs.

Here’s a brief look at
reporting capabilities for each system:

Workday

When users manage business
processes in Workday, it will make sense to utilize the reports within that
system. The Workday reports are often integrated into those business processes
and allow users to “drill-through” into the associated transaction and supporting details.

Adaptive

For managerial reporting like
budget-to-actuals variance and trending over time, Adaptive might be your tool
of choice. We can build summarized views of our budgets and actuals with powerful
drilling options. Analytics requiring slicing and dicing the data by the
various FDM worktag combinations, UBI will provide you the most flexibility.
The first UBI app for analyzing Journal Lines is in development now.

UBI

For analytics requiring
slicing and dicing the data by the various FDM worktag combinations, UBI will
provide you the most flexibility. The first UBI app for analyzing Journal Lines
is in development now. Today, most finance users are familiar with UBI
Reporting (aka Qlikview); our future UBI finance tools will use UBI Analytics
(aka Qlik Sense). The underlying functionality is very similar; however, with
UBI Analytics creating and sharing My Sheets is much easier once you get the
hang of it. If you want to get a taste of UBI Analytics and FDM, take a look at
the UVAFST FDM Mapping Tool located on the UBI User Hub. UBI Analytics training is available in the Workday
Learning Center as well.

Our data warehouse team is
busy developing and testing their Workday extracts that are going into the enterprise data warehouse (EDW). EDW will serve as the central delivery point
to provide data for UBI and data warehouses in the School of Medicine,
Facilities, the Law School, and others across the enterprise.

With all these tools
available, you may be wondering how you’ll find what you need. We have a small
group of users providing input and partnering with the HCM People Analytics
Team to prototype a Fiscal Administrator dashboard for reports/charts,
actions/tasks, and links to commonly used reports as well as informational
resources outside of Workday. This will serve as a landing page in Workday to
bring most things you need into a single location. We’ll have more to share on
this soon, and if the approach works, we can build the same for other user populations.

Also, don’t forget about the
newly launched UVA Business Terms. This is our new business glossary where you can find (and
request) definitions for all the new Workday finance terms you’ve been hearing.

Contributed by Mark Anderson

The Reporting & Analytics workstream has been working hard to get necessary reporting functionalities ready for go-live.

On the Workday front, we have developed well over 200 custom reports. We will address another 75 reporting user stories before July 1st. These numbers will continue to fluctuate as we get feedback from E2E and UER testing.

Over the past few months, we have been sharing reports and getting feedback from a small group of users from schools and units. As a result of this group’s engagement, we recently communicated that we would augment Workday’s native reporting with a number of UBI applications/reports. This decision was made after carefully considering users’ need for more flexibility and self-service customization of reports than we can support in Workday itself. By utilizing a suite of solutions leveraging Workday, Adaptive, and UBI, different reporting capabilities will provide various tools for you depending on your needs.

Here’s a brief look at reporting capabilities for each system:

Workday

When users manage business processes in Workday, it will make sense to utilize the reports within that system. The Workday reports are often integrated into those business processes and allow users to “drill-through” into the associated transaction and supporting details.

Adaptive

For managerial reporting like budget-to-actuals variance and trending over time, Adaptive might be your tool of choice. We can build summarized views of our budgets and actuals with powerful drilling options. Analytics requiring slicing and dicing the data by the various FDM worktag combinations, UBI will provide you the most flexibility. The first UBI app for analyzing Journal Lines is in development now.

UBI

For analytics requiring slicing and dicing the data by the various FDM worktag combinations, UBI will provide you the most flexibility. The first UBI app for analyzing Journal Lines is in development now. Today, most finance users are familiar with UBI Reporting (aka Qlikview); our future UBI finance tools will use UBI Analytics (aka Qlik Sense). The underlying functionality is very similar; however, with UBI Analytics creating and sharing My Sheets is much easier once you get the hang of it. If you want to get a taste of UBI Analytics and FDM, take a look at the UVAFST FDM Mapping Tool located on the UBI User Hub. UBI Analytics training is available in the Workday Learning Center as well.

Our data warehouse team is busy developing and testing their Workday extracts that are going into the enterprise data warehouse (EDW). EDW will serve as the central delivery point to provide data for UBI and data warehouses in the School of Medicine, Facilities, the Law School, and others across the enterprise.

With all these tools available, you may be wondering how you’ll find what you need. We have a small group of users providing input and partnering with the HCM People Analytics Team to prototype a Fiscal Administrator dashboard for reports/charts, actions/tasks, and links to commonly used reports as well as informational resources outside of Workday. This will serve as a landing page in Workday to bring most things you need into a single location. We’ll have more to share on this soon, and if the approach works, we can build the same for other user populations.

Also, don’t forget about the newly launched UVA Business Terms. This is our new business glossary where you can find (and request) definitions for all the new Workday finance terms you’ve been hearing.

The DMV is coming to Carruthers Hall this March

UVA Travel Services is bringing DMV Connect onsite at Carruthers Hall March 28-30 with a wide variety of services including:

REAL ID
Drivers' licenses
ID Cards (adult and child)
Disabled parking placards
vehicle titles
address changes
vehicle registrations
compliance summaries
transcripts
hunting and fishing licenses

Schedule your appointment with DMV Connect here: https://www.signupgenius.com/go/4090F4EACA92BA4FC1-dmvreal1

Jessica Price joins PSDS

Jessica Price has joined UVAFinance as a Sourcing Specialist in Procurement and Supplier Diversity Services and has thus far enjoyed the team atmosphere and camaraderie.

Just prior to coming to UVA, Jessica was a Sourcing Specialist with Community Coffee. She managed purchasing of everything from branded cups, to retail teas, to branded apparel.
With UVAFinance, she’s focused on purchasing scientific discovery products and services, as well as software.

“Accepting this position with UVA as fully remote, I expect there may be some challenges as a learning their new position and duties,” she says. “To face them, I’ve dedicated a working space within my home to keep me focused and in the same mindset I’d have while working within an office.”

Jessica reports that so far, the virtual orientation and transition has been seamless and she has enjoyed how pleasant and welcoming her team has been.

Jessica received a Bachelor of General Studies degree from Southeastern Louisiana University and outside of work, she enjoys spending time with her daughter and family. Her green thumb comes in handy as she says she’s “pretty obsessed with my houseplants” and has more than twenty. She also enjoys cooking, practicing tarot, and keeping up with the astrology of the world.

Jessica Price joins PSDS

Jessica Price has joined UVAFinance as a Sourcing Specialist in Procurement and Supplier Diversity Services and has thus far enjoyed the team atmosphere and camaraderie.

Just prior to coming to UVA, Jessica was a Sourcing Specialist with Community Coffee. She managed purchasing of everything from branded cups, to retail teas, to branded apparel. With UVAFinance, she’s focused on purchasing scientific discovery products and services, as well as software.

“Accepting this position with UVA as fully remote, I expect there may be some challenges as a learning their new position and duties,” she says. “To face them, I’ve dedicated a working space within my home to keep me focused and in the same mindset I’d have while working within an office.” Jessica reports that so far, the virtual orientation and transition has been seamless and she has enjoyed how pleasant and welcoming her team has been.

End-to-End testing has finished Cycle 3 and the team is ready to rollout the next step. With the help of our exemplary Change Leaders, we have identified personnel across Grounds who will be key to the next step in the testing process: User Experience Review.

The User Experience Review (UER) Kick-Offs will be held in two sessions on February 28th. UER is the final testing cycle of specifically selected scenarios. This testing will provide system exposure and gather valuable feedback and data to inform training development.

During the sessions, users will learn more about the UER process and expectations, including scope, timeline, and responsibilities.

Invitations to specific review sessions will be forthcoming, along with session-specific
details. While the kickoff is optional for UER reviewers, it is recommended for all involved with UER testing to understand the purpose and logistics of the effort. UVAFinance will provide additional details related to the timeline for testing specific topics during the Kickoff.

We look forward to seeing reviewers at the Kickoff Sessions. We appreciate the continued support and engagement as we prepare for Workday Financials go-live.

Testing time has arrived and systems that send or receive information via Workday must complete that specific testing by April 30. Running through testing scenarios now provides for more successful operations post July 1’s go-live.

To prepare, please finalize remediation of systems within your units and ensure they are ready and scheduled for testing. Scot Thornton, SRN Lead, is available to provide support if your units are not yet scheduled for testing.

For additional support and tools, visit here to access updated SRN resources.

SRN By the Numbers

Green (on track): 21 of 82 systems

Remediation part of the FST project work: 19 of 82 systems

Amber (moderate risk): 36 of 82 systems

Red (high risk): 6 of 82 systems

Unknown status: 1 of 82 systems

UVAFinance has participated in social media with a Twitter account and has just recently expanded our reach by launching a LinkedIn page. We invite you to access the page here and click on "follow" to keep up with what we are sharing with stakeholders. Even better, we invite you to share the page with your networks encouraging others to follow along. We aim to utilize online partnerships to grow followers and connect us with potential new team members as well as educate stakeholders on our work.

Create awareness

LinkedIn reports that more than two professionals sign-up on LinkedIn every second. This provides us the opportunity to network with an increasing number of interesting contacts, specifically job candidates. Using features on the platform, improve our visibility and demonstrate how dynamic and interesting our work is and how it benefits the university community.

Thought leadership and influencing

Providing regular content on LinkedIn can further position UVAFinance as a trusted resource. We plan on providing high-quality content that will be of interest to those in the UVA community as well as in higher education and financial networks. We will feature UVAFinance experts, Change Management best practices, Q&As with staff, and any other content that highlights our team as trusted advisors.

Connecting with Stakeholders

LinkedIn is useful for engaging with stakeholders and ensuring we are tailoring content to address concerns and interests. Additionally, we can interact with partners and start online conversations helpful to building our network and opportunities for engagement.

How You Can Participate

Click here and follow us!
From your LinkedIn account, click "create new post" and share this link: https://www.linkedin.com/company/uvafinance1. Add a short narrative, "Please follow UVAFinance to get the latest on our support for the University, our Finance Strategic Transformation project, and how we are growing our team."
As you see UVAFinance posts of interest, share them with your network. We hope to expand our reach and your help is integral.

Click here and follow us!
From your LinkedIn account, click "create new post" and share this link: https://www.linkedin.com/company/uvafinance1. Add a short narrative, "Please follow UVAFinance to get the latest on our support for the University, our Finance Strategic Transformation project, and how we are growing our team."
As you see UVAFinance posts of interest, share them with your network. We hope to expand our reach and your help is integral.

Security Role Mapping: The key to defining future state roles

"How will Finance Strategic Transformation impact my job? How will what I do each day be different because of FST?"

Those questions are at the top of many minds as spring arrives at UVA and the go-live of Workday Financials is on the horizon for this summer. While we can't say exactly how everyone will be impacted just yet, we're getting close!

The work currently being done in the Security Role Mapping Sprint that began in January will make it clearer to schools and units how their team members' roles might change (or how they might not). The Security Role Mapping Sprint is working toward a March 11 deadline to submit a draft of Workday security role assignments for their areas.

Note: You may hear Security Role Mapping referred to as "Workflow Control & Approvals"

It's intensive work: the group meets up to three times per week together to compare current Oracle processes and roles to the processes and roles available in Workday.

They're considering workflow, approvals, separation of duties, and designing the configuration of roles around business processes, not necessarily supervisory relationships. Although March 11 is the date when mapping will be submitted, schools and units will be able to make shifts in their mapping as needed before go-live.

Security Role Mapping is a key part of the FST vision, which includes a focus on efficiency and effectiveness and streamlining of our business processes. Another upside to having the right people in the right roles means that when the time comes for training, we'll know exactly who needs what role-based training.

Have questions? Want to know more?

Check out the role mapping resources on the Community or email us at FSTSecurity@virginia.edu

click image for a larger view

___________________________________________________________________

Read more about FST Training

Training: Before, During, and After Implementation

Contributed by Patty Marbury

As you have likely heard, Security Role Mapping is sprinting toward having most of UVA's roles mapped by March 11. Since Workday Finance training is based on the specific roles you will have, this effort is really important, as it determines what courses you will complete as we approach July 1, 2022. It is our goal to help you be prepared and able to successfully perform your work in Workday.

So let's talk about that training! As we create content the training team is focusing on the context of the processes, so you're not just trained on how to click through a transaction, but rather you will get an understanding of your part in the grander scheme—when and why is a process completed, who completes it, when applicable, what happens next, and of course, how you complete the transaction.

As a reminder, training will be offered in a variety of modalities:

Self-paced, online training, taken at your own convenience
Quick Reference Guides
Instructor-led training offered virtually and supplemented with in-person as needed

You'll also have access to a lot of support, post-go-live. The trainers will hold office hours to address your questions, and our new Finance User Success Manager Joey Carls is setting up a solution center to offer real-time help for routine questions and issues. We'll also be developing solutions with Workday Digital Assist, which provides on-demand help as you do your work.

Click image for a larger view

The FDM Sprint may be over, but the Foundation Data Model team is still hard at work. The team is working with SIS and other units to provide guidance on GL revenue mapping (read more about that here), and they're capturing entries in Oracle for mapping and budget conversion.

Our schools and units are also working to review their mapping and refine it, knowing that March 17 begins the FDM Frost, the last day they can request new worktags. Because final budget conversion will be done shortly after frost, they're striving to get their FDM mapping as soon as possible to minimize manual efforts post-go-live.

Click image for a larger view

________________________________________________________

For more information, see the FDM Resource page in the Online Community.

Questions about FDM Mapping? Email FDMMapping@virginia.edu

There are so many things to keep track of as we move toward go-live on the first of July. One item we're expecting further clarity on soon is GL balance conversion and ensuring that converted balances are directionally correct.

The FST team is working to refine the mapping rules and test the conversion of expendable fund balances. Our goal is to have something for our schools and units to review by mid-March.

What can you be doing now? A great thing schools and units to do is continue to clean up old balances and close projects where necessary. The team expects to make a GL Balance conversion report available around the ides of March!

Adaptive Planning Update

The Adaptive Team and their intrepid band of testers are deep in end-to-end testing of the version of Adaptive Planning that will integrate with Workday Financials upon its July 1 go-live date. Similar to the testing process with Workday Financials, once end-to-end has wrapped up, the team will move into User Experience Review (UER) of Adaptive.

During UER, schools and units will get to interact with the new functionality that this Adaptive 3.0 version will offer. Check out this past blog article to see the journey we've made so far using Adaptive Planning, from its pilot to the integration with Workday.

click image for a larger view

Remember, Adaptive is the source of truth for budgets at UVA. All questions from University leadership will be based on the budget in Adaptive.

Click image for a larger view

________________________________________________________________

Have a budget question? Ask the team anything here https://uvafinance.virginia.edu/form/adaptive-and-budgeting-ask-us-an

A glimpse at Cutover

As we get nearer to July 1, 2022, minds may be turning more often toward the particulars of making the jump from Oracle to Workday. Cutover (how we often refer to the turning off of the old system and the turning on of the new one) may be a shadowy idea to many of us, but FST project Cutover Lead Madhu Iyer began planning for it in detail upon his arrival late last year.

Iyer is working with FST team to capture all the tasks from each workstream for accurate cutover planning and anticipates sharing some dates and resources for stakeholders beginning in April. The dates will include cutoffs for doing different types of transactions in Oracle.

Watch the blog and UVAFinance’s other communication channels for more clarity on cutover as we move forward!

FST Update: February 10, 2022

Running short on time? Read "Five Things to Know about FST" for a quick update,

or listen in to WFST Radio.

Training

We’re all about quick reference
guides, or QRGs, right now. The trainers
are working with the functional team to get an avalanche of QRGs ready for User Experience review by the
end of February. With User
experience review or UER, starting this March, those QRGs will be very useful to
those folks across grounds who are going to get into the system to take it for
a test drive. Training is slated to be delivered beginning in May/June. Read more on the blog.

Expense Ambassadors

Trainers also recently held an Expense Ambassador kickoff with a group of about 70 really great folks from across schools and units to get them early exposure to how expense works in Workday Financials and to get them some early training so they’re ready to help our stakeholders across Grounds when Workday goes live. Read more on the blog.

Workflow Control & Approvals (Security Role Mapping)

After the FDM Mappers
met their goal of 85% of the mapping completed, efforts were refocused onto
workflow control and approvals. The
sprints are now working on mapping out security role assignments in their areas,
with a goal of March 11 to have those submitted. The groups meet twice a week and we’ve already
built up a pretty large library of resources in the online community. Read more on the blog.

Reporting & Analytics

The Reporting
and Analytics team has also been working tightly with folks from across UVA in
a focus group, to determine how best to support reporting needs. After working
with the focus group, the team has decided that augmenting Workday reporting
with UBI (Qlik Sense) reporting will be best, due to our need for flexibility,
customization, and self-service. Most operational, transactional, and real-time reporting will be
done in Workday Financials, while managerial reporting will reside in UBI and
Adaptive as needed, and UBI will also be where we go for analytics.

High-Level Timelines

We've included new timelines on both the FST
updates and on area-specific stories. As we draw closer to go-live, we thought a quick visual reminder of where the
project overall was headed, and where those individual work areas were
headed, would be helpful to you. Read more on the blog. (and see below!)

Future State Support

New Finance User Success manager Joey Carls has an eye on building a team that will serve as the point of entry for most UVAFinance questions. On the team since the end of January, Carls is moving quickly toward a soft launch of the Tier 1 level of support in March. Read more about Carls on the blog.

Click the image for a larger view

Running short on time? Read "Five Things to Know about FST" for a quick update,

or listen in to WFST Radio.

Training

We’re all about quick reference guides, or QRGs, right now. The trainers are working with the functional team to get an avalanche of QRGs ready for User Experience review by the end of February. With User experience review or UER, starting this March, those QRGs will be very useful to those folks across grounds who are going to get into the system to take it for a test drive. Training is slated to be delivered beginning in May/June. Read more on the blog.

Expense Ambassadors

Workflow Control & Approvals (Security Role Mapping)

After the FDM Mappers met their goal of 85% of the mapping completed, efforts were refocused onto workflow control and approvals. The sprints are now working on mapping out security role assignments in their areas, with a goal of March 11 to have those submitted. The groups meet twice a week and we’ve already built up a pretty large library of resources in the online community. Read more on the blog.

Reporting & Analytics

The Reporting and Analytics team has also been working tightly with folks from across UVA in a focus group, to determine how best to support reporting needs. After working with the focus group, the team has decided that augmenting Workday reporting with UBI (Qlik Sense) reporting will be best, due to our need for flexibility, customization, and self-service. Most operational, transactional, and real-time reporting will be done in Workday Financials, while managerial reporting will reside in UBI and Adaptive as needed, and UBI will also be where we go for analytics.

High-Level Timelines

We've included new timelines on both the FST updates and on area-specific stories. As we draw closer to go-live, we thought a quick visual reminder of where the project overall was headed, and where those individual work areas were headed, would be helpful to you. Read more on the blog. (and see below!)

Future State Support

Click the image for a larger view

1. The Training Team is producing quick reference guides (QRGs) to be used not only to facilitate training but also to assist testers across grounds during User Experience Review (UER) this March. The training team is also preparing Expense Ambassadors to assist stakeholders with the transition from Chrome River to Workday Financials.

2. The Security Role Mapping (Workflow Control & Approvals) Sprint is progressing, with a goal of all schools and units having a draft of their mapping by March 11.

3. Plans for supporting Workday Finance users after go-live are taking shape, particularly with the hiring of new User Success Manager.

4. The Reporting & Analytics Team has found from focus group work that a blended approach to reporting, including Workday Financials, Adaptive Planning, and UBI, will best suit UVA's needs.

5. New Timelines are being used in the blog to keep readers oriented on "what's next" as we move toward go-live on July 1, 2022.

Looking for the Guideposts

Let's say you are hiking a new mountain trail, anticipating the view from the final destination but you are also a bit nervous about finding your way and staying on the designated trail. Will it be clear? How will you know how far you've hiked? Will you know when you are close to the top?

Click the image for a larger view

It's a little like making our way to the go-live date with Workday Financials. We essentially know where we are going but reminders and clear directional information can be helpful. Much like hikers on a difficult trail, we need some guideposts showing us where we are and where we are going.

As such, the Communications team has developed branding around our Stakeholder Roadmap so that each workflow area is identified by an identifiable icon.

The goal is to help team members hone in on their areas and obtain information in a streamlined manner. Similar to the "5 Things" in the Blog Digest, having these graphical icons provides team members the opportunity to go straight to their area of work to get the latest updates including timelines, requests, and updates.

The icons will be used on the blog, in emails, on FST one-pagers, on the web, and in the Weekly Wrap. Each workflow area has a micro-timeline to help team members working in that area understand where they are in the process and what to anticipate next. For instance Workflow Controls and Approvals has a timeline posted on the blog here.

Please be on the lookout for these new guideposts assisting us with getting to that destination up at the top. We hear the view is incredible!

Joey Carls joined UVAFinance as Finance User Success Manager on January 31, bringing experiences from his role as Director of Operations in the UVA School of Education and Human Development.

In his previous position, he directly supported school leadership and unit administrators with the operational calendar and tracking, process improvement, employee onboarding, space planning, and safety. His team also supported school faculty, staff, and students with facilities matters, faculty affairs, events, and procurement.

“Now as the User Success Manager, it is my role to develop and then manage the new primary point-of-entry, Tier 1 support service of the new Finance service model,” he says.

“It is my goal to build a supportive and collaborative team of User Success Agents at the Tier 1 level and to partner with others in Finance for Tier 0, 2, 3, and 4 support.”

As the primary point of entry for most UVAFinance questions, Carls and team will monitor support activity across all tiers and identify ways to improve the service experience for stakeholders.

“We are aiming for a March soft launch of the Tier 1 service so that we have several months to refine processes before the July transition from Oracle to Workday Financials,” he reports.

Carls foresees the transition from Oracle to Workday Financials involving significant change with particular challenges along the way.

Carls is calling on past experience and understanding of change management practices to ensure a streamlined project rollout, “While the project team has prepared diligently for the cutover, process changes paired with our new centralized approach to support may be stressful for some finance users. Throughout my career, I have engaged in several process changes and will be applying my knowledge of change management practices to ensure our success. Building and maintaining positive, supportive relationships with end-users will be a critical component to our success in managing change to this support model.”

Carls reports the UVAFinance team has been incredibly welcoming and collaborative and says the opportunity to shape the future of support in UVAFinance and the excitement amongst team members is highly engaging.

Carls loves the Hoos but maintains he is a Mason Patriot through and through. He received his Master of Public Administration in 2012 and my Bachelors of Science in Public Administration in 2006, both from George Mason University.

Carls lives with his husband Noah in Charlottesville where they are soon to move into a new condo in the Brookhill development. They have three wonderful fur babies, Sullivan, Bella, and Twist. On the weekends, they spend time teaching courses in Cardio-Pulmonary Resuscitation and Emergency Medical Technician. During their downtime, they enjoy being with family and friends or traveling.

Five years ago, a team of more than 60 "Expense Ambassadors" - those working in fiscal roles across Grounds - partnered with the Travel & Expense Core Team to help ensure Chrome River was rolled out effectively in each of their areas.

Building on that success, FST is working with the Expense Ambassadors to help navigate the expense management side of Workday Financials. Some are returning Expense Ambassadors and many are new to the team, but all have expertise in their area and are familiar with expense and reimbursement systems.

Expense management is important for many reasons and a primary one is that so many employees across Grounds enter information into the system. From fiscal personnel to faculty, anyone can enter a reimbursement request and so it is important to ensure communication about the new system reaches everyone. Expense Ambassadors will answer employees' questions and use FST resources to help roll out the new processes.

On Feb. 3, UVAFinance's Training team hosted a kick-off meeting to prepare Ambassadors for the coming months. They were provided with bookmarked resources and a rundown of what to expect as go-live approaches. A number of Ambassadors are participating as UER testers and will be sharing their experiences and providing feedback.

In March, the Ambassadors will be provided a training demo for the expense system and begin to develop a list of anticipated questions from their units and departments. Knowing what their team members need to know helps them prepare to answer questions and provide assistance in the use of the system. Throughout May and June, Expense Ambassadors can encourage team members to take training as appropriate and continue to triage and funnel questions to the Training team.

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Thursday, February 24, 2022

FST Update: February 24, 2022

FST Update: February 24, 2022

Five Things to Know about FST: February 24, 2022

Notes from your friendly neighborhood LSP: Softphone Rollout

UVAFinance: Make plans to attend the Spring Fling!

Reporting & Analytics: An Update from Team Lead, Mark Anderson

Reporting & Analytics: An Update from Team Lead, Mark Anderson

Wednesday, February 23, 2022

The DMV is coming to Carruthers Hall this March

Jessica Price joins PSDS

Jessica Price joins PSDS

UER team prepares for Kick-Off

System Remediation Update

Join us on LinkedIn!

Join us on LinkedIn!

Tuesday, February 22, 2022

Security Role Mapping: The key to defining future state roles

Monday, February 21, 2022

Training: Before, During, and After Implementation

FDM Update: Firming the Foundation

Expendable Fund Balances: Info Coming Soon!

Adaptive Planning Update

Sunday, February 20, 2022

A glimpse at Cutover

Thursday, February 10, 2022

FST Update: February 10, 2022

FST Update: February 10, 2022

Five Things to Know about FST: February 10, 2022

Wednesday, February 9, 2022

Looking for the Guideposts

New Finance User Success Manager Looks Forward to Challenges and Change

New Finance User Success Manager Looks Forward to Challenges and Change

Expense Ambassadors Take on FST