People and Change: Faculty of Arts

The Faculty of Arts has recently engaged in an extensive project to transform the way finance and human resources (HR) services are provided to their 30+ units. The approaching implementation of Workday presented an opportunity for faculty leadership to collaborate with departmental administrators on developing a shared services model to best support the faculty as we move to a cloud-based platform. Assistant Dean, Finance Brian Lee and Director, Human Resources Kathryn Stagg along with Assistant Dean, Faculty Operations Gerald Vanderwoude are part of the team leading this change.

The creation of the service centre provides shared service resourcing for the faculty and provides opportunity for career development. The shared service model allows for a consolidation of the HR and finance duties into roles dedicated to these functions, rather than dispersing the duties to each unit where they may form 20-30% of an individual role. The organizational structures within the service centre will be based on a portfolio model where service centre employees will support a grouping of Arts units. Each unit will have access to a team of either HR or finance professionals to support their unique needs. Through this model, service centre staff are enabled to develop HR and finance skills and individual units will be able to refocus their resources in the areas that best support their unit priorities. 

The Faculty of Arts units include academic departments, schools and institutes as well as cultural venues like the Museum of Anthropology, all with different needs from an HR and finance perspective. Workday’s functionality and operating model offers a new way to share data with these units, while aligning the faculty’s HR and finance processes.

“Workday coming in really afforded us to take a look at how we were doing things and put some emphasis on the importance of doing it in a more streamlined way,” says Stagg.

Other objectives for the service centre include aligning with Workday’s security roles and improving data management.

Moving processes from individual units to the shared service model, while facilitating the change to Workday, is a significant adjustment for the faculty. Maintaining relationships and building trust has been key in the development of this new model. The leadership team wanted to ensure that the end result improved processes and workflow for the units. To that end, the Arts departmental administrators and staff were heavily involved in the design and development of both the model and business processes. 

Through this process Lee and Stagg have learned that effectively aligning the target operating model with people, processes and systems is key to the successful implementation of any system.

“Regardless of whether it’s Workday, PeopleSoft, Oracle etc., you have to ensure the people, processes and system are aligned effectively; that’s why we took the approach to develop this service centre,” says Lee. “By aligning the three together, that’s where you get your optimal success.”