Andrew Sallans Becomes UVAFinance’s First Engagement Manager

Andrew Sallans

At the end of March, Andrew Sallans joined the Finance team as the Finance Engagement Manager.
He is the first in the role, which is part of Bill Ashby’s finance strategy team. Collectively, Sallans has over 13 years of experience at UVA, most recently as Assistant Director of Electronic Research Administration in the Office of Sponsored Programs (OSP). He’s also a double Hoo, earning both a bachelor’s (CLAS History/Archaeology) and master’s (McIntire MSMIT) at UVA.

Sallans will be working on Finance’s service delivery model—how the department engages with our many diverse stakeholders.

“Everything I’ve ever done has included engagement with the community,” says Sallans. “I enjoy building partnerships, solving problems, and developing technical solutions to advance the mission. This role in Finance is a good intersection of all of those parts.”

As a component of his work on the service model, Sallans will be implementing Salesforce as a backend tool to support Finance customers. The platform will bring an integrated view of the customer’s relationship with the organization, and provide operational teams and leadership with much richer service analytics and trends.

“Salesforce is a powerful tool to provide visibility and enable data-driven decision making. Support staff will be able to see what customers have brought up before and the resolution,” says Sallans. “This makes for more informed and accurate customer service, and it relieves the burden for our customer of having to explain issues repeatedly.”

While Director of Operations at the Center for Open Science, his role before he joined OSP, Sallans led a Salesforce implementation for the organization.

He says, “It was a smaller scale at the center, but had many of the same goals and challenges. I learned many lessons from building that type of environment from scratch. Being able to apply that on a bigger scale in UVAFinance really appeals to me.”

According to Sallans, his previous roles also provided the opportunity to partner with colleagues from many units across Grounds. Though he hasn’t worked in UVA’s Information Technology Services (ITS), he’s partnered with many different groups within. Sallans values this partnership and is eager to continue building upon it in the new role.

A milestone in the next two years related to Finance’s service delivery model will be Workday Financials going live. Members of the UVA community will be using the same Workday portal for HR- and Finance-related tasks.

“People won’t necessarily know who owns which service, and many services cross organizations anyhow,” says Sallans. “Our priority is to develop a customer-centric service model where we can efficiently solve problems and avoid bouncing people around the organization.”

Sallans states that he’s always approached things in an iterative way, with an eye on continuous improvement. That experience and focus will serve him well in this new role. He explains that if we take years to plan everything out before getting started that the changes we’ve planned for may be irrelevant by that point. Instead, an iterative process makes it possible to make changes incrementally, deliver value quickly to the end user, and make progress on the long-term goal.

Sallans says, “We can provide more value sooner to our customers and train everyone as we go.”

When not working, Sallans spends time with his family. He and his wife have four children, ranging from newborn to seven. According to Sallans, that keeps them pretty busy.

Sallans’ family enjoys outdoor activities, he says, “when they’re allowed.” While he and his family are practicing social distancing, as we all are, he does still get to enjoy vegetable gardening.