Timeline
This level of change requires a multi-year commitment.
Replacing an enterprise system impacts every business process throughout the university’s Human Resources/Human Capital Management, Finance, and Student systems. Planning for the Elevate program required an extensive evaluation of our ERP system and the available cloud-based solutions used in higher education.
Implementation began on January 4, 2021 and includes two phases.
The first phase of Elevate will involve a 36-month implementation of Workday Human Capital Management (HCM), Financials, and Adaptive Planning. Human Capital Management (HCM) and Financials will go live in July 2023. Adaptive Planning, Workday’s budgeting and forecasting module, will deploy after HCM and Financials in January 2024, in time for the FY25 budget cycle. Workday’s Adaptive Planning module will greatly improve our budgeting processes with enhanced reporting and analytics.
The second phase begins after the implementation of HCM and Finance in 2023 and will involve the Student system. The HCM and Finance modules form the foundation on which the Student system will be built. The Student system will Go Live in Fall 2026.
HCM, Finance, and Adaptive Planning Timeline
Below is a high-level summary of our program timeline, with updates on what has been accomplished thus far, and the schedule of events to come, leading to a Go-Live for HCM and Financials in July 2023 and Adaptive Planning in January 2024.
January 2021 - April 2021
The Elevate Program successfully completed the Plan Phase of the project at the end of April 2021. During this time, the Elevate team successfully built a foundation for the rest of the project's success. We successfully:
- Confirmed the project's scope and established project management tools and processes.
- Recruited and onboarded 36 full-time and 2 part-time staff members onto the Elevate Program team.
- Conducted an organizational readiness survey across all four entities.
May 2021 - October 2021
During this phase, the Elevate team focused on understanding our requirements and analyzing how Workday will be configured to meet those needs. Some of these activities included:
- The Future State Process Design (FSPD) process helped Elevate define the who, what, when, and where of Workday’s major business processes, such as Recruit to Hire and Award Setup and Management. With the help of 62 subject matter experts across all four entities, Elevate conducted FSPD Drafting, Review, and Playback sessions for 23 separate HR and Finance business processes. These experts included individuals in both academic and administrative units who have HR and/or finance responsibilities and functional knowledge.
- The Elevate Program’s Change Management team organized 34 PIT (Project Implementation Team) Crews, which are small teams within Schools and Colleges or administrative groups that help employees prepare for and understand the upcoming changes. PIT Crews will be critical in ensuring a successful implementation by planning and implementing Workday program decisions for their units, providing input about impacts to current work processes, and more.
November 2021 - Jun 2022
Based on the information gathered in the Architect phase, during the Configure and Prototype phase Elevate will:
- Hold Customer Confirmation Sessions to finalize input from 300+ stakeholders across our campuses.
- Configure the Workday application.
- Build integrations and reports.
- Convert data from our legacy systems into Workday.
- Design the end-user training plan.
- Conduct Functional Overviews. These are demonstrations of Workday open to the entire campus community. In early 2022, Functional Overviews will include Introduction to Workday and Navigation, Employee Self Service and more.
July 2022 - March 2023
During this phase, Elevate will:
- Ensure the configured Workday system, integrations and reports sufficiently meet UMD's defined needs
- Develop and pilot end-user training and continue functional overviews
April 2023 - July 2023
During this phase, Elevate will:
- Move to production.
- Conduct training and support end-users as they transition to Workday.
Go-Live January 2024
Adaptive Planning is a separate module that will go live later than HCM and Finance in January 2024. Elevate will:
- Conduct requirement sessions.
- Design data flow, security and integrations.
- Build out the Adaptive Planning module in 11 “sprints” focused on different parts of the system.
- Conduct User Acceptance Testing.
- Create user guides and design training.