The ElevateR | September 2023

Message from Jack J. Blanchard, Associate Provost for Enterprise Resource Planning:

Last week, Elevate’s Executive Sponsors notified employees at the University of Maryland College Park, University of Maryland Eastern Shore, University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science, and the University System of Maryland Office that the November Go Live for Workday Human Capital Management (HCM) and Finance has been postponed.

The Elevate Program team consistently conducts assessments and evaluations to ensure that the implementation of Workday is a success. As noted by the Sponsors, recent assessments indicated that key technical and testing milestones related to payroll integration are not being met to our standards.

Although clearly disappointing, this decision allowed us to pause training two months prior to Go Live and will ensure that we are able to pay people accurately and reliably when we transition to Workday.  

Some key impacts of this postponement include:

• The Elevate team will continue their work to resolve identified technical and testing issues.
• On-demand courses are still available, but the deadlines for training completion will be extended and more details will be provided once a revised Go- Live date is determined.
• All instructor-led training and user labs have been postponed and will be rescheduled.
• Given the experience gained from the training that has taken place, the Elevate team is developing further training enhancements that will benefit our users in the future. 
• The freeze on some functions in PHR and eTerp that began on September 15, 2023 to prepare for a November Go Live have been lifted. 

As the Sponsors mentioned, Workday HCM and Finance will not Go Live before Summer 2024. The Elevate team is working to complete additional payroll integration testing and meet additional testing milestones related to payroll integrations before announcing the new Go Live date. The new Go Live date will be selected with the complex needs of our diverse campus communities in mind. We will work quickly to share the new schedule as soon as possible.

I want to extend my sincere gratitude to all who have completed their training courses and worked hard to prepare themselves and their units for this monumental change. These efforts are not wasted and will allow us to successfully transition to Workday in 2024.