People and Change: Office of the Vice-President, Research & Innovation

In UBC’s strategic plan, Shaping UBC's Next Century, research excellence is identified as one of the core areas, while innovation is featured as one of three themes. Helping UBC to deliver on these key components is the Office of the Vice-President, Research and Innovation (VPRI) in close collaboration with units within the portfolio which provide support to UBC researchers through a range of services including grant writing, internal funding competitions, grant management support, and human research ethics.

Systems renewal, another element of UBC’s strategic plan, will be realized through the implementation of the core enterprise system, Workday. Change management preparations are underway to equip VPRI portfolio units with tools and resources for the Workday human resources (HR) and finance implementation, coming to UBC on November 2, 2020. Leading change in the portfolio for HR and finance respectively are Director, VPRI Portfolio, Greg Martyn, and Managing Director, Research Support Services, Sharon Wu.

Modernized Business Practices

Although Workday is a significant shift to the way HR and finance processes are managed at UBC, Martyn and Wu appreciate the progressive change Workday represents for the university. As a cloud-based platform, Workday will modernize and streamline business practices by removing paper-based processes.

“Workday is reasonably intuitive and people are familiar with doing all their business online now, so there’s an acceptance and understanding of how cloud-based systems work,” says Martyn.

The Shift to Workday

The shift to Workday presents an opportunity to consolidate HR processes within the VPRI portfolio. With Workday, HR transactions will be assigned to specific security roles in the VPRI central HR team.

“One of the things Workday is doing is bringing consistency in business processes,” says Martyn. “Centralizing those HR transactions with our HR team was the logical thing for us to do at this point.”

In finance, Wu is looking forward to improved user experience and process efficiency with Workday. Previously, it could take up to two weeks for a purchase transaction to complete through the system. In addition, purchases are not immediately reflected in the actual budget balance available. Workday will provide real-time data and enhanced tools for forecasting and budgeting, improving turnaround time for financial processes.

Integrating RISe with Workday

UBC researchers and administrators use the RISe research application system to process grant applications, including approval and funding. As the owners of RISe, VPRI, in partnership with UBC IT, recently completed a considerable retrofit to integrate with Workday.

“The RISe system will have a significant impact for the research community, as all researchers who are applying for grants or have sponsored research contracts will interface with RISe,” says Wu. “The retrofit to the RISe system ensures compatibility with Workday in terms of how the two systems interface and transfer data to and from.”

Workday Readiness through Training

With less than two months before Workday goes live, Martyn and Wu are focused on readying the portfolio units through training. The Integrated Renewal Program (IRP) offers two end user training delivery models for faculties/units to train their groups: 1) training provided alongside several other specific faculties/units, or 2) training provided for their group only. The VPRI chose option one and is attending training sessions with other executive offices.

“We have representatives from the finance and HR teams engaging with the trainers for VPRI and Governance,” says Wu. “We’ve been managing scheduling to ensure our identified trainers are properly equipped to deliver training to VPRI, Office of the Provost and Vice-President Academic, office of the Vice-President Health, and Governance.”

Martyn and Wu regularly share Workday readiness information to their portfolio through timely updates and presentations to the senior team. The latest update highlighted the Workday Learning Rovers, co-op students who provide Workday support across all faculties and units. With the training sandboxes now available, identified trainers will soon be communicated out, along with how training will be delivered.