Name: In Conversation with Federation University
Uploaded: 2024-09-18T02:57:35.558Z
Duration: 30 min 4 s
Description: In Conversation with Federation University

Transcript for "In Conversation with Federation University": Nope. You're a rock star. We're all rock stars. Just because Workday makes you great at finance and HR. Does not make you a rock star? No. I think it No. It doesn't. Okay. And finally, for future proofing the business, our q one rock star is Tim. Excuse me. Tim, do you have a platinum record? Tim, do you have any platinum records? Technically, no. Using responsible AI doesn't make you a rock star. Kinda does. I have that same outfit. Really? Well, I I have an outfit. So Oh, look at my queue and numbers. I'm a rock star. Great job putting finance HR on one platform with Workday. Thank you. Anyway, yeah. You're a rock star. Data driven insights and large language models. Oh, that's so rock and roll. It is. Right? He gets it. Yeah. He does. Hey, Travis. Check out my ink. Spring break 98. That presentation Oh, Carmen shredded at the beginning cycle. She's a rock star. She's just wrestling. I mean, Bruce. I'm not such a Sometimes it's hard to be around her because You are not rock stars. Okay. Most of you are not rock stars. Well? No. He loved it. You people are. Hand over the air guitar. I've got another one. Welcome, everyone. Andrew, it's great to have the chance to connect with you today in a forum like this that allows us to look back on the journey that Federation University have had so far with Workday. I've had the pleasure of partnering with you and the team for the past couple of years, and I'm looking forward to diving into this conversation today. To get things started, can you provide us with an overview of yourself and your role at the university and with Workday? Yeah. Thanks, Laura. It's been great working with your team as well through implementation and looking forward to sharing some of our story today. So, I'm Andrew Henwood. I'm the head of employee experience at Federation University. I look after our payroll team and our HR operations team. And during the workday implementation, I was our HCM functional lead, and leading the the project for for people and culture. Right. Excellent. Thank you for that. So we kicked off your phase one Workday project almost 2 years ago now. Could you summarize what was included in the project and a bit of a summary of how your 1st year as a a live customer has gone? Yeah. Certainly. Look. We, we certainly kicked off by trying to implement as much as we possibly could so that, we went live with as much of a offering to our, staff and our teams as we as we could. So that included core HCM, talent, time and attendance, learning, people experience, and that was one area for us that was quite exciting to be able to to launch early in the piece to be able to have, all our knowledge articles and quick reference guides inside help, and also be able to turn on the Workday assistance. So that was a really exciting, piece for us to be able to to roll out to the business day 1. Yeah. Great. And I wanna touch on that Workday help a little bit more later in our conversation. But could you tell us a bit about business case? So what were the drivers for the change? Why now, and how did that this transformation support the university's overall strategic goals? Yeah. Certainly. Look, we come from, you know, many disparate systems, within the people and culture function. None of them really talked to each other. There was, you know, lots of manual intervention between our recruitment activities and our payroll systems. We had a payroll environment that was trying to be a HCM, and manage positions and, reporting line changes and things across the university and provided very limited self-service to the broader business. So this for us was very much around bringing our people and culture function into a modern and contemporary environment, ensuring that we we offered, self-service activities across both our employees and our management chain, to cut down on many of the manual and paper based processes that we're asking them to do throughout, their their interactions with people and culture. Right. And I really felt like the business case themes permeated through the implementation, and part of the reason for that was you all had such strong guiding principles. So, you know, when we're in the project, we really pointed back to those guiding principles quite frequently, especially during the principles and then how you see they're contributing to the project success? Look. For us, the journey started long before we really commenced implementation or commenced the work with your team. We knew a lot of our systems were inefficient and our processes were not always adding value to the business. So we spent a lot of time in the 12 months leading into implementation, really challenging how we were doing things. And that journey for us even meant that where we could in our old systems, if we could get some small incremental change, we actually made it free going live, Workday. And we did that deliberately so that we got the team into that change mindset and the mindset of, you know, looking for efficiency, asking the questions as to why we do things. And then that led into us, you know, developing a really key set of guiding principles for the project, which were very much around that, you know, asking the why, you know, keeping without a box functionality, you know, configuration rather than customization, and, you know, some really key principles around how many approvals we wanted in particular workflows. So, you know, we set that down very early, and and I think that made it really successful for us is that we shared that with your team. You know, that very early kickoff day, one of the first things we did was run through those guiding principles. So not just the Federation University staff had an understanding of what trying to achieve and how we're gonna go about it. All of our interactions with, Cognizant throughout the journey also allowed us to come back to those same guiding principles in those challenging conversations. And I think the really pleasing thing for me was that your team held us to account to some of those guiding principles as well throughout the journey. So and as a result, we did we come out with, you know, what I believe to be really efficient processes. We minimised workflow approvals. We got rid of a lot of old processes that happened in the university that weren't necessarily adding value. So we removed approvals where people just needed visibility to a transaction where historically, a signature on a page was that way somebody got in visibility. So by replacing that with notifications and reporting and other activities, we were able to really simplify what we do. Yeah. Definitely. I definitely saw that lift and shift mentality not really, you know, expose itself at all because we already had those guiding principles. We're aligned on them. So that was definitely a key contributor, I think, to us being able to move forward and meet our timelines. So if you could rewind and reflect on your expectations before the actual formal project kickoff, would you say what was originally proposed and anticipated aligns with what was deployed and how it was deployed? And in thinking about that, what would you do differently, or how was your perspective changed about how Workday supports the university strategy? Yeah. Look. I think we we've certainly, designed and delivered what we set out to achieve, and I think in a lot of cases, we've probably pushed the boundaries and and delivered more than what we would originally thought. So, you know, we've introduced a a number of new concepts, particularly in the talent space and how we manage performance and how we we do goal setting and starting to introduce succession planning and talent pooling within the environment. There were functions that didn't necessarily occur in the past, so we've certainly, you know, been able to come out the other end of implementation with a lot more things than we had probably anticipated. And, our self-service journey, I think, has really kicked off, positively, and and we've got a lot more engagement across the business than what we've probably originally thought in in some of those areas, which is fantastic. In terms of what we would have done differently or what we would have liked to know before we started, I think for us, there was probably 2 key callouts in that space where, you know, had I had my time over again, you'd probably spend a bit more time pre project. And and I think one of those was around really understanding and getting your job architecture right. It was one area for us that it really didn't exist in the business previously. And it's not just about the job architecture, it's about understanding how those job profiles, you know, link into workflow approvals, how you define your management levels, and and how you define what you actually want the the job architecture to do in terms of the the broader business and and how it interacts with within the environment. The other thing for us, which I think is a key call out for anyone, is also really unpack and understand your delegations within the organization. We had a lot of historical delegations that were probably more we thought on paper they look like they're role based, but they're actually more people based, and they don't necessarily line up with, a a hierarchy or organizational structure or a management chain approach. So doing a lot of prework in that space probably would have saved us some time throughout the project. I don't think we would have designed a lot differently in terms of our workflow approvals, but it would have saved us a lot of time into going back and explaining to the business during the go live phase why we, designed certain approvals in the way that we did. Great. Yeah. That's good insight. So thinking about the the project timeline during that time, how did it expose how business units were working with each other prior to go live? And then after you kind of uncovered that, how has that evolved and even improved as you've gone along in the journey? Yeah. Look. Interesting. I think within my team, you know, one of the things we saw really quickly in the project was that coming together of our payroll function and our HR operations functions. It certainly, you know, forced our teams to to work in a lot more of a cross functional and collaborative environment. It's not that they weren't before, but it really exposed that need, to do that because we definitely been so interconnected. You know, having that visibility within the team of how workflows were are, are behaving, you know, the flow of transactions, you know, who needs to approve certain things in time and manners or input data in a timely manner really has brought those teams together, to get a better understanding of of how they're they're interconnected. And as a result of that, I think, you know, now they're working a lot better together, and there's a lot more conversation in the office, and there's a lot more understanding. Wait a minute. If I do this task, it's gonna have an impact on payroll tomorrow, so let's make sure we get it right so we don't, don't have unintended consequences. Across the broader business, I think it's certainly identified for us where there was a lot of practices that were occurring that were not necessarily following the path that, you know, a people and culture team would want them to follow, and that might have been because a paper process allowed someone else to do it outside the management chain. It allowed for practices to occur, that weren't necessarily aligned with policy and procedures. So by bringing it all back into a self service workflow environment, you know, we're now driving a consistent approach across the business. So it doesn't matter what business you you work in, everybody engages a casual person in the same manner, and follows the same process and has the same approvals, the same checks and balances in place. So for that for us, that's delivering, you know, a far better approach to how we engage staff, but also ensuring that the university now is following policy procedure and, in a compliant path. Yeah. Great. Yeah. That consistent user experience is really one of the the advantages you glean from a transformation like this. So Federation University made the deliberate decision to focus on the planning for your target operating model starting pretty early in the project, although post go live isn't necessarily the first thing you're thinking about when you're launching a project of this scale. So I think that kind of speaks to the fact that your approach was to keep the post go live state at the forefront of all the conversations. So can you talk us through what that planning looked like for your target model and particularly that and how the project team acclimated back to life in BAU after go live? Yeah. It was a really interesting one for me. I think, you know, we were fortunate to have somebody in our project, that had done very large scale implementation before, from the business side and and understood the importance of the target operating model. I remember having some first conversations, you know, 6 months out from go live. I'm thinking, I haven't got time for this. We're still trying to design the system, let alone figure out how we're going to operate within if I go live. But it certainly proved to be a really valuable exercise. So we very quickly identified what we wanted that operating model to look like, who our key SMEs were that are going to be part of the target operating model post go live, and that identify identification allowed us to then ensure that the people that are in the project that were going back to BAU knew very early that they were going back to their BAU roles post go live with an additional responsibility of administering and, you know, enhancing the system, on an ongoing basis and having that involvement within Workday community to understand upgrades and enhancement opportunities. So that certainly allowed us to move into production, you know, in a really good space. So, you know, where we did have a backlog of continuous improvement type activities after our go live date, you know, we had the right team in place. They they're already across what those items were looking like. They already understood how to prioritize and and categorize them in terms of when we were going to to make those changes or those enhancements. They also understood, you know, any compromises that had to happen. So, you know, it's always nice to to go and turn on all the shiny new components, but sometimes it's not practical for the business to be to do that straight away. So they understood the consequences because they've been part of the testing and part of the design previously. So rolling those project resources back into BAU with a really clear objective around the target operating model, allowed us to really manage our backlog list really, efficiently, but it's also ensured that we're not putting things onto our backlog list or our, you know, enhancement list that aren't actually going to add value to the business or, we'll thought through either. I thought that was very well, carefully executed, right at go live. So business as usual didn't cease to exist during this transformation. And in fact, your team was also participating in enterprise bargaining during your implementation. So not only did that create challenges for the team in just managing priorities, but it also meant you needed to continually we needed to continually, review design decisions that had already been made that could potentially be impacted by new bargaining terms. So can you elaborate on how you and the team navigated that? Yeah. Look. It was quite a difficult time in terms of enterprise bargaining and and having that land in the middle of a a large project like this. There was a lot of things on the table throughout the bargaining period that were gonna have significant impacts to how we delivered the Workday environment. You know? There was major changes to how we were going to treat casual engagement for our academic workforce. There was significant changes around leave provisions and and types of leave entitlements that the people were going to get post the implementation of the enterprise agreement. And, unfortunately, that didn't always line up. They they you know, we had a November go live for Workday, but the enterprise agreement wasn't scheduled to be completed until December. So we already had to disconnect with, you know, when things were gonna become available. So for us, it was really about having clear understanding of of what where the bargaining process was at, understanding what were the must have can't files within that process, and what was actually going to happen regardless. So we we took a position where we were absolutely certain that certain provisions were gonna change. We took the courage to implement those prior to the agreement actually being completed. So it was a little bit of a leap of faith, but it positioned us really well that it meant when we went live, you know, things around key leave activities were able to be configured in the system. But at the same time, we also had to put pause on some things where it was a little bit uncertain. So we had some significant changes, as I said, around casual engagement and particularly minimum engagement for academic workforce. So that was a piece of work that we had to put on hold in terms of having it ready for go live because we had to wait for the certainty of the agreement to go through before that could happen. So we a clear understanding of what it was gonna look like, but we wrapped it up into a post go live project and made sure that that activity kicked off as soon as possible so that we could implement without delay. Mhmm. Yeah. I mean, that's great perspective for anyone who also faces that that timing challenge in the future. So from from my perspective, just to talk a little bit about prioritization, but in general prioritization of enhancements, as we got closer to go live, we're coming out of the test phase, and we really can't take anything new on. And I thought the project did a really good job of of separating what was critical for go live and what could be more of a a day 2 initiative. So, again, keeping that post go live state in mind. So what was your process for prioritizing what was critical and what wasn't? Yeah. Look. I think this comes back to having that understanding of the target operating model early too, Laura. You know, one of the advantages we had as part of our target operating model planning is we built a prioritization framework in terms of understanding the business impact of what we wanted to prioritize, you know, categorizing it against, you know, functional impacts on p and c teams, you know, realization of the benefits out of the project, was it a compliance activity in terms of payroll or legislative compliance? So we certainly use that methodology in terms of prioritising our tasks. So if it was low business impact, low real life benefit realisation, well, it was put on the list to be looked at post go live, but where it was a key critical compliance matter, that was gonna have a significant impact on realizing benefits out of the project, well, then we certainly still did prioritize and push through to try and make those things happen. Great. So you touched on this a little bit earlier, but one of the unique and exciting components from my perspective of this project was the fact that you incorporated so much of the people experience module into your phase 1, which up until the time we kicked things off wasn't very common, I don't think. So can you talk through how incorporating the knowledge articles and the case management and HR assistant on day 1 contributed to the university's value realization with Workday? Yeah. Look. We going into Workday, yeah, we we had a ticketing system within people and culture. It was fairly immature in terms of its development. It didn't have a lot of content in there and knowledge articles and and other information for our staff to access t zero support. So being able to incorporate that into Workday help from day 1 was really exciting. So, you know, we we certainly had some demonstrations early in the process around how Workday help was going to work, and that furnishing of quick reference guides and knowledge articles as people are starting to type their help case to help them get to a tier zero support piece rather than actually logging the ticket was a really exciting prospect for us. And it went beyond that. It wasn't necessarily just around, you know, inside Workday help. It was, you know, when you're using a search function in Workday and looking for a change job task and it's bringing you back the quick reference guide that goes with that task, it's immediately putting that knowledge information in front of the users at that point of of needing it. So it really helped us with the just in time training component, or the just in time information for our staff. Certainly didn't completely cut down all the phone calls and inquiries that come into our team post go live, but I'm certainly confident that between that and Workday Assistant, we did cut down a lot of the the the phone calls that were coming in because people could access information in a timely manner. And also outside of business hours, people can still, you know, use workday access in this information, outside of work hours and not have to wait to, 9 o'clock the next morning to pick up a phone and talk to one of my team members to understand how to use it to a change job process, for example. So it was exciting to turn that on. Yeah. For sure. And I think the one cool thing about the rolling adoption piece is that even after go live, you're able to report on the cases that are coming into your team and see, do we even have the right categories established here, or are people selecting the miscellaneous category too often? And maybe we need to build that out a little bit more. So even seeing you guys, look at that after go live was, was something that was an immediate kind of fix, and and it was good to see that. And certainly allowing for people to then, you know, identify where we need to provide extra support to. So, you know, we could we could run those reports daily to see what was coming in through our help cases. We could run reports to see the access, of knowledge articles in in Workday help so that we can then identify whether we need to provide, you know, further guidance to the business during that, go live phase. It was it was great. Excellent. Thanks for that. So speaking of your end users, universities have a very diverse worker population. Of course, at the center of everything is our faculty and our students. And so over or under communication, striking that balance is always sort of a concern with the transformation of this scale, especially when we know our academics' priorities are teaching, research, not submitting a transaction in Workday. So how did your change management strategy sort of facilitate that stakeholder getting the right amount of information about Workday in a in a timely manner? Yeah. Look. I think we took an approach that was certainly different to what we've done within the university in the past. You know, historically, we were very, you know, we very much go down paths of, you know, significant amounts of consultation, big working groups, and bringing lots of people to the table to be involved in design design type decisions. We certainly didn't take that approach, for this implementation. We relied on our SMEs, and our subject matter experts within people and culture to actually make those critical design decisions around how we wanted processes to work. But what we did alongside of that is we had a number of reference groups, from representatives across the university, both, more both within the academic space, but also within the the administrative space. And we use those groups to really start to socialise what was gonna change in a Workday world. We started to use you know, introduce them to the language of Workday, the types of functions and things that they would be using in the Workday environment, and started to really share with them how their journey would change rather than actually bringing them to the table to make design decisions. It doesn't mean we didn't throughout the journey. We certainly had a couple of, you know, sticky points where, you know, we were looking at a particular process that we wanted to implement. We couldn't find the best way forward. You know, part a was disruptive to 1 cohort. Part b was disruptive to another cohort of staff. So we actually brought users back together in that scenario, and we presented the 2 scenarios to them and helped got them to help walk through with us, you know, where we saw the best way forward. So we involved them in in that conversation, and and I think that was a really good way way to do it. So then when we did go live, we had a great network of change agents who understood the Workday terminology, understood what it was we're trying to achieve from the project, and were really invested in an efficient and a self-service way of doing things, and they really worked well for us in terms of supporting the business. Great. And I think keeping executive leadership informed and aligned was also a key dependency for your success with your stakeholders. And can you walk us through how that worked during the implementation, how you leveraged existing channels and even the vice chancellor's messaging for that? Yeah. Certainly. Look. We we had a lot of channels that we were communicating through to staff with the status of the project, but also some of the changes that were occurring. So, you know, we embedded it all within our regular communications, though. So we use the existing frameworks of extended leadership network meetings, voice chancellor's communications that were going on a regular basis, and we ensured that the Workday project communication was embedded in all that. So very early in the piece, it started to feel like a BAU conversation. It wasn't a standalone project that we had a defined start and end date, so it become part of the language of the university very, very quickly. And I think that worked really well for us because people were consuming it at the same time as consuming other information for, across the university. And I wanna say they didn't have an opt out option, but they certainly didn't get to pick and choose whether they engage with the Workday communication because they wanted to hear the vice chancellor's presentation, so they got a bit of Workday information as part of that. And I think that was really key for us in terms of embedding the project across the organization. It was a great communications rollout. Thanks for that. So, look, the university got off to a great start with Workday from my perspective, owing to the strong internal and business leadership and capping things off with that successful go live, where do you see your Workday journey taking you in the future? And what does the road map look like for the university? And how do you see the Federation University continuing to use that rolling adoption methodology of Workday? Yeah. Look. I think for me, yeah, we've established a very sound foundation for our Workday implementation. I think we've got all the core functionality that we want in there and working really well. For me now, it is about how we add value back to the university. It's around positioning our people and culture function to have a seat at the table in strategic conversations, leveraging the power of what we have within Workday. So really excited to be able to to roll out skills cloud, you know, enhance our job profiles to bring in skills information and competencies, really document qualifications against, certain positions so that we can leverage the talent function within the environment to, you know, map people to future positions. Really wanna be out in a position where, you know, we're proactively encouraging people to, go for promotion opportunities because we know from a Workday space, you know, what their skills are, what their prior experience is, what qualifications they hold. We have information from the managers around, you know, the assessment of their potential in terms of, you know, where they see them growing within the organization so that we can really grow our workforce, so that, you know, we we deliver on the objectives of the university. Great. And I'm looking forward to seeing all of that materialize for for the university as well. So thank you for your time today, Andrew. It's been great to look back on your success with with Workday. Thank you, Laura. It's been a been a great journey and, yeah, exciting and looking forward to the future.