Finance Transformation News

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The FST project is on-track (see our Phase 3 timeline here).  Currently, a small task force from within the team is putting together different scenarios involving the Coronavirus and its possible impact on the project. They’ll be working with the Steering Committee and Executive leadership to determine if any adjustments to the project timeline need to be made. More on this soon!

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Architect sessions are in full swing, remotely of course.  There are 55 of them scheduled between now and May.  Architect sessions, using our "building a house" metaphor, are like framing up the house.    We will take all the information from the Data Gathering sessions --- user stories, transformation opportunities, current processes, challenges, and pain points – and discuss with process owners and subject matter experts how to make our processes work easier and better in the structure of Workday financials. 

Topics of discussion in the architect sessions will be:

• the setup of our Workday tenant (the tenant is our instance of Workday here at UVA)
• our own processes
• how we want to use what’s available in Workday
• what data we’ll need to convert
• how the data will be used in Workday
• what our users need to be able to do their jobs effectively.

The aim of the architect sessions is how to make things better, not just different.  Once those sessions are done, our project tech team will take over and configure the tenant using the data provided by the architect sessions.  We’ll show and tell the tenant, make adjustments based on feedback, and then enter an intensive time of testing in the fall.  By intensive, we mean we’ll be running all of our end to end processes using our data.  Read more about the Architecture Sessions on CommunityHub.

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The FST Team has been doing roadshows with Workday Expenses to show how it compares to Chrome River, the solution we use now for ExpenseUVA.  The team has discussed this with both our Steering Committee and Advisory Group, and will be bringing the demo to Fiscal Administrators on April 15.  Read more about feedback so far on CommunityHub.

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Say hello to these new team members:  Addie Coe from UVAFinance has joined the project team, and Andrew Sallans, formerly of OSP, has joined UVAFinance as Finance Engagement Manager, and he’s going to be working with the project team to help work out the future state service model.