Project Updates

In February, 2023, Chancellor Lowery-Hart notified the College that the Workday Student implementation would be slowed to allow an in-depth review of College processes negatively impacting student completion. This hiatus will give us time to determine, from a Student perspective, what we must change. The project is expected to resume with Workset B in July of 2024. It is expected that this will push the go-live date to Fall 2026.

Initial Executive Steering Committee meeting. 

The Statement of Work with Workday defining Workday’s responsibilities as ACC’s Integrator was signed and forwarded to Workday.  The agreement delineates specific expectations of both ACC and Workday, as well as the cost of this service.

During the weeks of May 8^th and May 15^th, ACC hosted multiple Workday sessions, covering all critical areas of Workday Student.  The first week’s sessions, from May 8^th to May 12^th, included a total of 27 virtual sessions hosted by Workday staff assigned to the project.  These sessions were designed to provide Workday with a “30,000 foot overview” of ACC’s current organizational structure and processes related to students and curriculum, as well as providing ACC staff an initial general overview of how Workday Student can be configured to support our processes in the Workday environment.  These initial sessions totaled more than 60 hours of training over the week.  Approximately 130 ACC staff members were invited to participate, with most invitees attending.  Workday staff noted the high levels of participation and engagement from the ACC staff. 

The second set of sessions were held on May 16^th and May 17^th.  These meetings were primarily face-to-face, although zoom links were provided for some sessions to allow additional ACC staff to attend virtually.  Approximately 90 ACC staff members and 20 Workday staff, on-site at ACC, participated in the face-to-face training sessions.  These sessions included general sessions as well as concurrent break-out sessions for key functional areas.   Key functional areas, or workstreams, are:

Breakout #1 – Student Recruiting and Admissions
Breakout #2 – Academic Foundation/Core & Records
Breakout #3 – Curriculum & Advising
Breakout #4 – Financial Aid
Breakout #5 – Student Financials

During these meetings ACC staff continued to refine Workday’s understanding of ACC processes as well as discussing in greater detail how ACC processes might be configured in Workday.  These meetings were also used to determine a detailed timeline for additional, more detailed meetings with Workday when we begin the Architect and Design stage of implantation.  The insights and decisions from these discussions will be incorporated into the Workday work sets, and the resulting Workset Playbooks, prior to the next set of meetings with Workday.  These additional meetings will focus on detailed business processes used by ACC and how those processes will be migrated to the Workday Student system.  It will be critical for ACC to have the appropriate subject matter experts involved in these detailed sessions. The groups also discussed how ACC will handle those times when, due to the staged move to Workday, we will be required to concurrently use Workday for some functions, but Colleague for others.  These discussions centered on determining the “system of record” for all systems that will be involved with the Student deployment, when specific events will happen in these systems, when integrations will begin and end, and how to handle changes in data during these transitional times.  Initial decisions were made for each functional area, but with the caveat that these decisions will be reviewed many times throughout the deployment.

During this time, using the information from the discovery sessions, Workday personnel developed the initial Workset Playbooks.  They also built an initial foundation tenant for ACC staff to interact with.  This foundation tenant is a test environment, using actual ACC data, where ACC staff can become familiar with workday processes, review the configuration of business processes using the sampling of real ACC Data, and begin reviewing and testing the initial configurations selected in Workday.

ACC received the WorkSet Playbooks from Workday.  The Workset Playbooks are a compilation of the output from our May meetings with Workday.  They are a detailed listing of all ACC SIS related processes by Functional Workstream.  The processes are broken down by timeline, with an expected start date and process configuration end date.  This is a critical component of the implementation, as it is the basis for our overall project plan and timeline. 

Training for Functional Core teams, Subject Matter Experts, and workstream leads began in July and was completed during August.  Staff working in different areas participated in both general training to better understand the workday system, as well as training specific to their individual areas of expertise to help them better manage the migration of business processes to the workday system. 

Additionally, the Functional Core teams began review of the Workset Playbooks to ensure that they capture accurately the results of the May discovery and planning sessions.

An Executive End-to-End Demo for Workday SIS was held on August 11^th.  Workday personnel hosted and presented the demo. ACC Deans, Department Chairs, Student Affairs staff, Core Team Members, Administrators and other personnel attended the session.

The Statement of Work with Premier International Services is expected to be signed this week.  Premier will assist us with Data Conversion/Migration from our Ellucian Colleague system to Workday Student.  The related budget item was approved by ACC’s Board of Trustees at its August meeting.

The Planning Stage of the implementation will be closed in late September, with Architect and Configure beginning immediately after that, in late September or early October.