People and Change: Office of the Vice-President Academic

The Office of the Vice-President Academic (VPA) oversees a diverse portfolio at UBC, including information technology, academic initiatives, enrolment, teaching and learning, and indigenous affairs.

With the implementation of Workday for human resources (HR) and finance coming on November 2, 2020, the VPA change management team is busy preparing the portfolio units for the transition. Director of Finance, Provost Portfolio, Jenny Lum, and Human Resources Advisor, Laura Lockyer-Cotter are supporting the portfolio through this change.

Moving to a cloud-based system will remove many paper-based processes at UBC. Workday will bring transparency to business processes with the ability to view data in real-time. Lum and Lockyer-Cotter are looking forward to Workday bringing the HR and finance systems together, replacing systems which provide a certain, specific function, like the Online Payment Tool (OPT) or the Personnel Absence Tracker (PAT).

Many current systems used by the university are outdated and require repetitive tasks to complete a process. For example, to create a purchase order currently the information is first entered in one system, sent to UBC Finance, re-entered into the Financial Management System (FMS) which then generates a PO. With Workday, the PO will be tracked and approved in one system, eliminating duplicate entry and processing time.

“If the same person is approving for two different roles, a process only needs to be approved once in Workday,” says Lum. “We should be able to track each process step within the system, so that’s exciting to see.”  

Facilitating the implementation of an enterprise system like Workday often requires a collaborative approach. While each unit in the VPA portfolio functions slightly differently, all are adjusting the way they work to fit within the Workday-specific business processes. To meet the needs of the many VPA portfolio units, Lum and Lockyer-Cotter have separated them out into groups with similar support functions.

“People feel a bit more comfortable to ask questions in smaller groups. Others in the same unit or different units may have the same questions,” says Lockyer-Cotter. “I think this approach has been really successful.”

While this approach increases the number of meetings to attend, Lum recognizes the benefits of grouping the units together.

“Every time I attend, I’m able share what each group has discussed with the other groups,” she says. “That’s been really helpful.” 

As the Transition Network leads for finance and HR respectively, Lum and Lockyer-Cotter utilize their Transition Network captains to cascade information down through the units. While Transition Network leads are key facilitators of their unit’s transition to Workday, Transition Network captains are the Workday knowledge experts embedded within their unit.

With the Workday implementation for HR and finance quickly approaching, the focus in the VPA has shifted to training. VPA has adopted the model where Workday training is provided alongside several other specific faculties/units. VPA is grouped with the Office of the Vice-President, Research and Innovation, office of the Vice-President Health, and Governance. With this training model, trainers are utilized across different areas.

“We have a quite a number of people engaged as trainers because we work on a buddy system, so there’s two trainers per session,” says Lum. “We felt this was an opportunity to get more people engaged with training and Workday, and when more people are engaged there’s more acceptance and support for the portfolios.”

Although the start of the school year is always a busy time for the academic portfolio, there will be a surge of training for VPA in October. Identifying the top ten key things to know for Workday go-live, providing tools and resources, and connecting units with the Workday Learning Rovers are several ways units will be supported in the coming weeks. 

As with any enterprise system implementation, it’s important to recognize that the shift to Workday may not be perfect at go-live. However, those facilitating change are fully committed to supporting their units. After three years of working towards the Workday implementation, there is an excitement at UBC to see the new system operational.

“People are really committed and putting a lot of their personal time into this,” says Lockyer-Cotter. “I think that’s important to recognize, because even though we’re all figuring this out together, for the most part people are on board and trying to work with us to get there.”