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Message from Jack J. Blanchard, Associate Provost for Enterprise Resource Planning:As of today, we are 80 days out from Workday Go Live!Important cutover dates are fast approaching, with key Last Day Activities beginning on September 13th. Throughout August, key business owners across the University and our institutional partners sent notifications to users of impacted systems to ensure that we are prepared for this critical period in our Workday implementation. As a reminder, all critical cutover dates are on the Elevate website and also on our Google Calendar.Workday Training RemindersThis afternoon, the Elevate Program will begin sending training reminders to employees. These reminders are meant to empower you to prioritize your recommended training curriculum and track your progress. We will be sending training reminders on a regular cadence to users, based on the extent of their training curriculum.Please note that if you did not receive an email this afternoon, it is likely that you only have to take Introduction to Workday, and you will begin receiving your reminders in September.Additionally, some employees may receive direction from central business units office that some courses may be mandatory based on their security access in Workday. This will impact only a select group of employees, who will receive emails outlining the requirements.New Learning Hub: Managers in WorkdayThis new addition to our Learning Hubs is a great resource for managers to prepare for Workday. Learn about key concepts for managers, including in-depth overviews of supervisory organizations, the worker profile, and staffing models. 

Message from Jack J. Blanchard, Associate Provost for Enterprise Resource Planning:The relative quiet of summer is a good time to make progress on your Workday training, especially if you have several recommended courses. You can receive your recommended and optional Workday courses via email anytime by visiting our website.The Elevate Program has additional resources that can help supplement on-demand training courses, including:Business Process Workflows Business process workflows help you visualize a process in more detail, from the initiation step to the last step, of a business process. Each workflow has two components. There is a workflow diagram which offers a visualization of the process. There is also a corresponding table with workflow details. These tables can contain more information than is provided in the diagrams, like any perquisite information for the Initiation step, for example. 

Message from Jack J. Blanchard, Associate Provost for Enterprise Resource Planning:Earlier this month Elevate announced our specific Go Live date: November 15, 2024. To reach this date, the Elevate Program team spent months diligently mapping out the detailed timing of when our legacy systems (e.g., Kuali Finance, PHR) will need to be shut down so that finance and HR data can be converted and transferred from these old systems into the new Workday system. As described below this will require planning and participation by all units to minimize business disruptions. Some systems being replaced by Workday will become unavailable for completing business processes as the Elevate team migrates data to the Workday platform. These systems will have “freeze” dates and last days for activities which allow for data to be accurately converted and transferred, minimizing manual data entry when Workday goes live. During these periods certain finance and HR activities cannot be initiated until the new Workday system becomes active. We have collaborated with a number of key stakeholders to determine the best timing of these freeze dates to minimize business disruptions. Specific information about dates and systems impacted are being shared months in advance so that campus units can plan accordingly. We have created a number of resources to help you and your units prepare for this transition to our new Human Capital Management (HCM) and Finance system.  These resources include detailed information on all finance and HR systems impacted and the dates that specific functions will not be available.  Communicating these details to staff and faculty will be critical to ensure you are as prepared as possible. These resources can all be found on the Drive to Go Live page on the Elevate website. Notably, you can subscribe to our Google Calendar to stay informed of important dates for HCM and Finance systems.

Message from Jack J. Blanchard, Associate Provost for Enterprise Resource Planning:Earlier this month, the Elevate program team republished our updated, enhanced training courses and they are now available for you to take at your convenience. Some of the enhancements you will find in the new training courses and materials include:More natural-sounding audio-narration for all 24 on-demand coursesImprovements to specific Workday simulations and course content based on course survey feedbackUpdated course content to reflect the most current Workday configurationYou can enroll in courses on the On-Demand Courses page on our website. If you had previously enrolled for a course, you do not need to enroll again. Your enrolled courses are accessible from your Open Learning Student Dashboard. If you need a reminder of your course curriculum, you can submit this form to receive an automated email with that information. Elevate has made significant progress with completing the payroll supplemental testing plan put into place after the September 2023 delay. To address the issues identified with payroll a number of technical and administrative steps have been taken.  This has included an external review of our payroll efforts, regular senior leadership engagement with Greg Oler (CFO) and Jeff Hollingsworth (CIO) to assess payroll progress, and full cycle testing of the payroll system to confirm that changes have successfully corrected identified issues.  Regular testing of the Workday payroll system will continue. Getting payroll right is a top priority for the Elevate program team and our Sponsors, and these mitigation efforts will ensure that our transition to Workday goes smoothly in November 2024.For our transition to Workday, the Elevate team is currently mapping out what the cutover period (the period of time when we transition from our legacy systems to Workday) will look like, including last day activities and system freeze dates. Since we are once again going live in November, these dates should be quite similar to what was planned for last year. As soon as these dates are finalized, Elevate will inform our campus community and our partner institutions via email, and post all freeze dates and last day activities to our Drive to Go Live website. Stay tuned!

Message from Jack J. Blanchard, Associate Provost for Enterprise Resource Planning:If you’ve completed an on-demand Workday training course, you should have received an email from our Executive Sponsors earlier this month about course completions. The Elevate Program’s new timeline, with the Go Live of HCM and Finance occurring in November 2024, has created challenges in retaining the information learned for our staff who may have taken training nearly a year before Workday will Go Live. With this in mind, the Executive Sponsors decided:Users who have previously completed the “Introduction to Workday” course will not have to retake this training.To ensure readiness for Workday we ask that users retake all other courses because of their specialized content. Prior completion of all other courses will be removed from the user’s Open Learning Student Dashboard.Our training team has taken advantage of the new timeline and spent the last several months enhancing these on-demand courses. Most importantly, we have added more natural-sounding audio narration to all 24 courses! The course content has also been updated to reflect the most up-to-date system configuration. We have also added new resources such as business process workflows and crosswalks and guides to the Elevate Resources and Training webpage. We encourage you to bookmark this page as the training team is regularly adding to and refreshing these resources.Currently, courses are inaccessible and enrollment is closed as we work to publish the new and improved courses. Courses will be available the first week of April for you to take at your own convenience.As Workday Go Live will occur in November 2024, you can complete these courses whenever works best for your specific learning needs or priorities. Best practice for this kind of training is to complete it within two months of Go Live. With this in mind, we will be rolling out more comprehensive training communications and reminders as we get closer to Go Live.

Message from Jack J. Blanchard, Associate Provost for Enterprise Resource Planning:The news is out: Workday Human Capital Management (HCM) and Finance will go live in November 2024, as announced this month by our executive sponsors. This announcement was preceded by months of work by the Elevate Program team to conduct payroll integration testing, as well as making many enhancements to Workday training and resources, to ensure that our community is ready for Go Live. We know many have questions about system freeze dates, last day activities, and Workday training. Our team is working to coordinate these activities with our new Go Live and will communicate with campus as soon as possible. With such a large system implementation, we know that transparency and accuracy is paramount, and we will work to keep our community in the loop so that units and departments can plan accordingly.

Message from Jack J. Blanchard, Associate Provost for Enterprise Resource Planning:With the start of 2024, we wanted to provide an update on the Elevate Program since we announced the implementation delay in September 2023. We understand that everyone is eager to learn about the revised timeline and, given progress made, we expect to be able to announce a new Go-Live date in the coming weeks. Below is a summary of our activities and accomplishments that build toward our Workday Go-Live in 2024. Following the delay announcement, the Elevate, Payroll Services, and DIT team completed a review of all PHR payroll integration documentation. We updated our Workday payroll integration logic to match this documentation, and we sent a full-volume test payroll file for all UMD employees from Workday through the USM Consolidation Site and Central Payroll Bureau. The file passed successfully the first time, which was a very positive result. Elevate and Payroll Services then began processing a parallel test that compared the amounts of every person’s paycheck between PHR and Workday, which also had a positive result.  We are currently performing the first of two additional parallel cycles now. We will continue planned rigorous testing and refinement of the payroll system to ensure that it meets our needs.In addition to work on payroll, our Elevate Program team has been working on enhancements that will improve user training and the user experience for our staff, faculty, and graduate students. During the initial roll out of Workday training, we received over 6,000 user surveys as well as feedback from our PIT crews and central offices (UHR, Finance, Procurement) on ways that we could further improve training. This feedback has led to nearly 200 enhancements to training courses and materials including the creation of detailed process flows for key business processes and the creation of crosswalks and guides for users to understand how prior activities in PHR and KFS will be conducted in Workday.Additionally, the Ultimate Kronos Group (UKG) Time System went live on December 5, 2023. This cloud-based time clock system replaces the Kronos and CSTime Card Swipe Systems. The UKG Time System offers improved functionality and reliability and will pave the way for a simplified transition to Workday. The Elevate Program team worked with departmental card swipe time administrators, time keepers, and DIT partners to implement this new system. This transition impacted 90 time clocks and 5,500+ employees with card swipe positions across Facilities Management, Student Affairs, Athletics, Dining Services, RecWell, Residential Facilities, Health Center, Engineering and DOTS.

Message from Jack J. Blanchard, Associate Provost for Enterprise Resource Planning:Since the postponement of Workday Go Live, the Elevate Program’s leadership has been assessing how this will impact our other Workday initiatives, including Adaptive Planning and Student. On November 9, 2023, Eduardo Lorente, AVP for Budget & Planning, notified users that Workday’s budgeting tool, Adaptive Planning, will also be delayed to coordinate with the rescheduled Workday Go Live. As a result, the FY25 Working Budget will occur in the Budget Preparation and Maintenance System (BPM) in Spring 2024.The Elevate Program team is also moving forward with Workday Student, to ensure that we are laying the groundwork for the next phase of this transformational project. The Student Executive Steering Committee (ESC) has been assembled with their first meetings scheduled in December 2023. The Student ESC will be evaluating possible timeline options to begin implementation of Workday Student.I want to take this opportunity to acknowledge that our Elevate Program staff along with stakeholders across our partner entities have completed a number of major milestones in 2023 to prepare our community for Workday Go Live. Although we have had setbacks, the foundation we have laid will set us up for success in 2024. We are grateful for our engaged stakeholders who have provided us with feedback about the program thus far, and we will act on these insights and make necessary adjustments to continually improve our processes. We look forward to hitting the ground running towards a Workday HCM and Finance Go Live in 2024.

Message from Jack J. Blanchard, Associate Provost for Enterprise Resource Planning: As was announced last month, the Go Live of Workday has been postponed. While the new Go Live date has not been determined, the Elevate Team is busy with a number of ongoing activities that will continue to drive us toward a successful Workday implementation in 2024:  Payroll integration testing, including completing the Central Payroll Bureau integrations. Making enhancements to our Workday configuration, including some streamlining of business processes and improvements to data conversion. Our business owners will complete an additional round of design signoff by January, ensuring that our key stakeholders and leadership are up-to-date on recent enhancements. Refreshing our Workday tenant for our team and stakeholders to be able to test and practice in the Readiness Tenant with more up-to-date data. Improving our documentation and other resources better guide and support our campus stakeholders. This work is essential for University Leadership to be able to confirm a new Go Live date. It is our goal to have key milestones reached in January 2024, leading to an updated announcement about Go-Live in early 2024.  Things You Need To Know: Training is still available. With training deadlines being extended, we recommend that you are strategic about when to complete your training. It is important that you complete training, but it is also important that you retain what you learn during training. Those individuals who have access to the Workday Readiness Tenant should use this time to practice in Workday the same business processes they complete today. The Elevate Team will resume communications with campus about training closer to the new Go Live date. HCM and Finance cutover activities are on hold. The Elevate Team will communicate again about updated cutover activities closer to a new Go Live date.

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.

Message from Jack J. Blanchard, Associate Provost for Enterprise Resource Planning: We are approximately two and a half months away from Workday Human Capital Management & Finance Go Live!   Training became available on July 17 and as of August 28 over 2,500 users have completed the online “Introduction to Workday” course. If you have not already begun your on-demand training courses, now is the time! For faculty and staff that have more training to complete, consider setting aside time on a regular basis dedicated to Workday training throughout the semester. If you’re unsure what courses to take, complete this form to get an email with your course curriculum. You don’t want to wait until the last minute to try and get your training in right before Go Live. As you progress through your training curriculum, you can view your completed or in progress courses on your Open Learning Student dashboard. Supervisors can support their staff by monitoring their training progress with the Workday Training Dashboard. Links to this training dashboard have been sent to all supervisors with bi-weekly email reminders. The dashboard provides visibility into training progress and allows supervisors to encourage and support staff as they prepare for the Workday transition.  As we draw closer to the November 15 Go Live, we will begin winding down the use of some systems being replaced by Workday. For many of these systems, there will be a “Last Day” to complete some or all of the business processes these systems support. The period between the Last Day in the legacy system and the first day in Workday is a “freeze” period. This freeze period allows for data to be accurately transferred so that when Workday goes live there is minimal manual data entry. Users of these affected systems will be receiving notifications and reminders of related Last Day Activities and deadlines for these systems to ensure as smooth a transition as possible. I also encourage you to visit our Drive to Go Live dates to view all affected systems and deadlines. You can also view and subscribe to our HCM and FIN Google Calendars to stay current with key deadlines and last day activities Finally, I want to remind you all how important it is to stay up to date on all things Elevate in these last few months before Go Live. There will be a flurry of emails and communications headed your way during this period. Please take the time to review all of the communications you receive and complete any necessary actions in a timely manner. Our team is making a dedicated effort to be mindful of your busy schedules and full inboxes, but ultimately we need your help to ensure a smooth transition to Workday. 

Message from Jack J. Blanchard, Associate Provost for Enterprise Resource Planning: Workday Training is HERE! On July 17, 2023, the Elevate Program team launched training for Workday! On-demand training courses have been available for all employees to enroll in for just over one week. It has been so exciting for our team to watch training enrollments climb and to watch our future users complete their courses. As of today, we have 763 completions of our first course, Introduction to Workday. We look forward to watching these numbers climb over the next four months, as we know that this training will be integral in preparing our staff, faculty, and students for Go Live on November 15. If you have questions about which Workday courses to take there are several sources of information.  You should have received an email from the Elevate team on Jul 13, 2023 that summarizes your Workday security roles, the recommended and optional courses to complete based on your job needs, and the link to enroll in on-demand computer-based training courses. You can receive another email with your course curriculum by completing this form.  If you have other questions about training please visit the Training section of the Elevate website. As you complete your courses, we also encourage you to begin exploring our Learning Hubs. Learning Hubs, which are accessible through our website, contain additional resources and information for Workday areas and topics. Learning Hubs allow you to access our wide array of job aids, which provide step-by-step instructions on how to complete certain tasks in Workday. These job aids complement our on-demand training courses and are meant to serve as reference material when you complete your day-to-day tasks in Workday on November 15 and beyond. Our team is proud to have been able to provide our users with on-demand courses, job aids, and Learning Hubs four months before Go Live. It is our hope that you are able to use these four months to prepare yourself and your unit for Workday.