Meet Our Sponsors: Kate Ross

Kate Ross is the Associate Vice-President, Enrolment Services and Registrar. She has an extensive background in student and enrolment services and has led a variety of initiatives to enhance the student experience. She is an advocate for supporting access to post-secondary education and is passionate about creating effective student financial support. As one of the lead sponsors for the IRP, Kate took time to share her excitement for what Workday represents for the future of UBC’s students, faculty and staff.

Tell us about your history with UBC, your current role and your sponsor role for the IRP.

I joined UBC as the associate vice-president of Enrolment Services and Registrar in November of 2013. A big part of that role is to support academic administration of both campuses and the university as a whole. This encompasses everything from the student recruitment and application/admission process, course and exam scheduling, and registration for courses, culminating in the conferral of degrees. My involvement with the IRP began at its inception in 2017, where I was involved in developing the governance for the program, and providing leadership for all aspects of the program.

What is your vision for the IRP?

IRP operates within an ecosystem with several different components and programs working cohesively together so that all the current business processes will work efficiently and effectively together with Workday. For instance, we are getting insight into what the Workplace Learning Ecosystem will look like through the Workday model. It’s an important piece of the puzzle, since this program is responsible for developing required training courses for employees, but it is still just one component that we are working to configure with Workday. So my vision for the IRP moving forward is working towards creating elegant and modern solutions for how we do our work at UBC.

What excites you about all the changes that are going to happen with Workday and what we're doing through the program?

Workday is helping us take the leap in modernizing our legacy systems that has been around for a very long time, and creating a better use experience. It will help individuals using these applications extensively, gain better insight into improved business processes and decision-making practices. Working to upgrade our human resources and finance operations, we will start to see both of these significant business systems become more unified. When you consider the geographic size of UBC, Workday will help integrate how we operate between our two campuses. We will move from the Vancouver and Okanagan campuses collaborating together from two locations to working cohesively as a unit.

What do you see as some of the challenges with this transformation?

The university itself is large, and with that comes the challenge of integrating all operations, which is significant in scale, into a new model. With a transformation this complex, another challenge we face is making sure the UBC community to understand how meaningful this change will be for them, their colleagues and the people they lead. People will need to address their everyday practices and operations that they have become accustomed to, and learn to understand that this change will lead to more effective and efficient outcomes moving forward.

What does success look like to you when we launch Workday?

The most important factor for the community in a successful launch of a new initiative like this, is to ensure everyone gets paid and it happens on time. For employees, a sign of success is a better workflow process that includes easy access to information and training in the most helpful manner. For the finance community, success looks like a seamless transactions with our vendors and suppliers.

How do you see the UBC community working to help make the change a success?

Over the past couple of years, I have seen this community effort in the transition period in the program, and without this support, the work being done by the IRP wouldn’t be possible.  Support we have received from the community was gained substantially through the Transition Network (TN). They have been a valuable bridge that helps deliver information provided by the IRP program to their various units. With significant change, people tend to only acknowledge how Workday will affect them once it is required of them during the launch. The TN members are working to not only bring awareness of the changes, but engage with the community to get them ready in a matter that is most applicable to them and their teams. Any success we achieve with the launch of Workday will be heavily contributed by the hard work of our TN members.