FST Update

 

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We're halfway through the Configuration & Prototype phase of FST. The FST team is working on the second configuration of UVA's tenant of Workday Financials, and the second round of Customer Confirmation Sessions is planned for May of 2021. Go live of Workday Financials is July 1, 2022. Check out the project timeline on the FST webpage.

When the University replaced the human resources system, some configurations had to be established to integrate with Oracle, our current financial system. However, once Workday Financials launches on July 1, 2022, UVA will have one Workday platform for both human resources and finance processes. Read more on the blog. 

In terms of Adaptive Planning, the Workday budgeting tool that UVA has been using since last year, Schools and Units are working with the Adaptive Planning team on FY22 Budget Development and to prepare for the "3.0" version of Adaptive Planning that will go live with Workday Financials in July of 2022. We’ll be doing more regular updates in the coming weeks on the work the group is doing.  Read more on the blog!

 The FST project team will have a series of FDM mapping activities beginning this March during which schools and units will partner with the team to review current GL strings and identify future state FDM mappings. Specific details about this, including time commitments and other expectations, will be made available very soon.  In the meantime, check out the FDM basics in the online Community.

If you’ve been wondering if you’ll use UBI much after Workday Financials goes live, the short answer is “maybe, but likely much less than you do today.”  After go-live, Workday will be your go-to source for financial reporting and analysis, but UBI will still be around for special use cases. Read more about UBI in the future state on the blog.

The Reporting and Analytics team has been busy behind the scenes.  They’ve been meeting with the Spend team to figure out how to handle new reporting requests, and working with the Office of Sponsored programs to better understand their reporting requirements.

Last week, the Finance Strategic Transformation (FST) team completed the last of six interviews with other organizations about their support model implementations. The Project Management Office (PMO) team targeted universities (and one corporation) that use one or more Workday platforms. Their goal was to gather information to evaluate peers’ support model implementations in terms of several characteristics, including level of support centralization, governance maturity, best practices observed, and key lessons learned.  Read more here.

Five things to know about FST: February 25, 2021

1.  Schools and Units are working with the Adaptive Planning team on FY22 Budget Development and to prepare for the "3.0" version of Adaptive Planning that will go live with Workday Financials in July of 2022.  More on that here.

2.  Chart of Accounts Work:  The FDM (Foundation Data Model) is the Workday term for Chart of Accounts. The FST project team is planning a series of FDM mapping activities this spring: schools and units will partner with the team to review current GL strings and identify future state FDM mappings.  Specific details, time commitments, and other important information will come very soon.  Have you checked out this video in the Community about FDM basics? 

3.  Reporting & Analytics:  If you've been wondering if you'll use UBI much after Workday Financials goes live, the short answer is "Maybe, but likely much less than you do today." After go-live, Workday will be your go-to source for financial reporting and analysis, but UBI will still be around for special use cases.  More on that here.

4.  Change Leaders from the Advisory Group are sharing sneak peek videos with their stakeholders during the next few weeks.  The videos feature a high-level look at common processes in our Workday Financials tenant.  Find the Advisory Group member for your area on the FST website.

5.  We're halfway through the Configuration & Prototype phase of FST.  The FST team is working on the second configuration of UVA's tenant of Workday Financials, and the second round of Customer Confirmation Sessions is planned for May of 2021.  Go live of Workday Financials is July 1, 2022.  See the roadmap here.

Rakesh Gurrala Joins FST Team as Workday Reporting Consultant

Rakesh Gurrala, one of FST’s newest team members, leads an active and exciting life outside of work. “Most of the time you can find me on a hike or playing one sport or another,” he says. “I love being out in nature, especially. If given the choice between living in a mansion or a tree house, I’d absolutely choose the tree house. I even have plans to build a mobile home on a commercial van someday!”

Rakesh’s active lifestyle is likely an asset to him on the FST project since the team is already quite busy and will only get busier as Go-Live steadily approaches. Rakesh is looking forward to it and feels ready to take on any challenges: “I feel great! I am glad that I get to work in a very interesting functional area with an amazing team.”

As a Workday Reporting Consultant, Rakesh will primarily work with the Functional workstream and the Report Development team. He will also work closely with Deloitte team members to develop reports and will gather requirements from stakeholders.

“The most interesting part of this role is to work on the grants management aspect of implementation,” he explains. “It’s a great experience for me and it’s good to see that the project has a great scope of new Workday reporting techniques to use.”

Welcome to the team, Rakesh!

What about UBI?

 As we get closer toward the go-live date of Workday Financials in July of 2022 (how much closer?  Check out the countdown timer feature on the FST webpage), a reporting and analytics question keeps coming up:  What about UBI?  Will we use UBI in the future state, after Workday Financials is implemented?

The simple answer:  Maybe.

To delve in a little further, UBI will not go away, but Workday will replace it as your go-to source for financial reporting and analysis. 

Your use of UBI will be much less than current state use, for sure.  Day-to-day finance reporting will be done in Workday, but UBI modules and reports can be used when you need to look up data from prior to July 1, 2022.  UBI will continue to be the reporting tool for student finance and student records, and it will be a repository for extracting large volume data sets for analysis.  It may also be used for some specialized financial reporting or unusual use cases that cannot be met in Workday.  

We'll have more information coming on the Reporting and Analytics workstream, so stay tuned!

Have specific questions about UBI?  Visit the UBI space in the Online Community!

X Marks the Spot: FST's Hunt for Support Model Insights

Last week, the Finance Strategic Transformation (FST) team completed the last of six interviews with other organizations about their support model implementations. The Project Management Office (PMO) team targeted universities (and one corporation) that use one or more Workday platforms. Their goal was to gather information to evaluate peers’ support model implementations in terms of several characteristics, including level of support centralization, governance maturity, best practices observed, and key lessons learned. Insights gained from these conversations will ultimately contribute to choices UVA makes about the support model implemented for Workday Financials and how it will mesh with existing support.

FST Project Manager Phil Hamlett explains, “That’s the whole idea behind cross-platform support: that’s where the ‘cross’ comes in. The idea is to make it one. To marry it and make sure there’s a good integrated model doing support for Workday HCM in HR and Workday Financials.”

Hamlett conducted most of these interviews with peer institutions; he started participating in project work related to cross-platform support around May 2020.

“We’ve been having conversations about what a good, robust cross-platform support model may look like,” Hamlett explains. “We had our first workshop back in October with the senior leaders to talk through it—set the tone for what we thought we wanted to do.”

At that meeting, leaders asked for more information about what peer organizations are doing to gain a firmer basis of reference to inform decisions for UVA’s approach. That’s how these conversations with other institutions came about.

The discussions yielded a number of helpful key findings for the PMO team. Most peers used both Workday’s HR and finance systems, with two of the universities also readying to implement Workday student information software. All the organizations use a standardized service platform, such as ServiceNow. A high level of IT involvement and support team integration is in place for most of these peers. Governance maturity, overall, is high, though some still struggle with the proper governance model. The level of centralization differed between the groups, with roughly half centralized, half decentralized in terms of support.

The organizations also shared best practices based on their implementation experiences. For example, Georgia Tech advised socializing new processes and procedures as soon as possible once established.

“The sentiment that we heard early and often was to start on support model as soon as you can,” says Hamlett. He explains that several peer organizations shared that they waited until late in their implementation process to start thinking about the support model. “Several of them said the fact that we were starting as early as we were, since we’re going live next year—they said that was a very good thing.”

Wake Forest shared that the university is quite siloed; they experience challenges with IT and functional owners sometimes making changes independently without realizing the affect it would have on others. This issue highlights the need for a unified approach to changes moving forward after implementation.

LSU and Texas A&M have tiered support models similar to what UVA has in place now with HR Workday. In A&M’s support model, each case is assigned an owner. That person is responsible for ensuring the issue gets resolved, even if others are engaged in the process throughout.

Georgia Tech also shared that their reporting and data warehousing needs were underestimated; that’s definitely something we’re working on at UVA already. The cross-platform support workstream established four working groups, and the data, reporting, and analytics group has been active for some time.

Hamlett says, “We want to translate these insights into action items.”

The information gained from these interviews will inform recommendations the team will present to senior leaders at a second cross-platform support model workshop in late March. After the recommendations are discussed and decisions are made, the other workgroups (end-user support, operations, and user adoption) will ramp up their activities with a clear path ahead.

As far as collaborating with peer institutions, this round of conversations was only the beginning. “All of them were very enthusiastic about us staying in touch and sharing best practices,” Hamlett says.

Many of the other universities are interested in continuing the dialogue and developing collaborative relationships to keep sharing best practices that will help each other.

“That was one of the best things about it,” Hamlett explains, “the fact that we established this dialogue, these working relationships with these institutions doing something similar to what we’re doing.”

Watch President Ryan's Video About Staff Senate Elections

 

From Melody's Desk

Dear Colleagues, 

 I want to thank you for your participation in our Finance Engagement Survey! 

 Earlier this year, we sent a short survey to everyone in central finance, our partners across Grounds, and the vendors with whom we work, asking for each group’s assessment of our services. 

The goal of the surveys is to not only get a solid baseline of feedback about UVAFinance’s current level of service but also help us shape our future-state service model. Although much of our discussion of the project is given to the intricacies of implementing Workday Financials by July of 2022, Finance Strategic Transformation involves quite a bit more than just Workday (as if that were not enough!). The other major components of FST are the implementation of Adaptive Planning, the development of enhanced reporting and analytics, and an intensive process of Continuous Improvement. 

You can see more about the four parts of FST here, but one major area under the “Continuous Improvement” header is the construction of the future-state service model. The Finance Engagement team has been working hard to design a more streamlined customer experience (read more about that in the blog). Your thoughts will help us to better understand our baseline as we move forward. 

Thank you again for sharing your thoughts. I’m grateful for the UVAFinance team and our extended finance family – your commitment to the transformative effort we’ve undertaken is much appreciated!

 Warmly, 

Reminder: T&E Card Annual Training ends on February 28

If you haven't completed the required annual T&E card training this February, make plans to do so soon! The training must be complete by February 28.

Cardholders received an email on February 1 with a link to the training. Contact Card@virginia.edu with any questions or concerns!

Cardholder training is designed to give cardholders the most current information on T&E Card policies and procedures and is required. 

If training is not complete by February 28, cards will be suspended on Monday, March 1.

If you are no longer using your T&E card, please cancel your card.

New on Finance Matters: Six ways to support employee well-being

During times of stress, it's important that we as managers and as teammates pay attention to our own well-being and that of our colleagues. Patty and Brandi discuss six practical strategies that work both in and out of a pandemic.

LISTEN IN NOW ON FINANCE MATTERS

Resources Mentioned:

The original blog post

UVAFinance Shoutout board

HCM Alignment as Part of FST

When the University replaced the human resources system, some configurations had to be established to integrate with Oracle, our current financial system. However, once Workday Financials launches on July 1, 2022, UVA will have one Workday platform for both human resources and finance processes. With this in mind, Workday Human Capital Management (HCM, Workday's term for human resources) alignment has always been a part of finance transformation.

According to Josh Breeden, a Business Process Analyst on FST’s functional workstream, the partnership between these two areas is already well underway. 

“Recently, members of the FST Payroll Costing, Grants, and Budget teams met with the HCM technology workstream for a sort of HCM crash course,” he explained. “We went over key terminology and data elements to discern how that information flows from HCM into the various Finance functional areas in Workday.”

There are some follow-up sessions already planned, which include topics such as the use of FTE in HCM and how the “Academics” setup in HCM might assist in tying financial data with faculty tenure and appointment information. In addition to these topics, the teams will also review the Period Activity Pay and One Time Payment business processes with consideration for how new Costing Allocation processes may impact what’s currently in place.

Keep an eye on this space as well as the FST website for future updates on this part of the FST process!

Adaptive Planning and Budget Process Redesign

Click image for a larger view

Schools and Units are working with the Adaptive Planning team on FY22 Budget Development and to prepare for the "3.0" version of Adaptive Planning that will go live with Workday Financials in July of 2022.

The Adaptive Team is partnering with stakeholders in a Budget Working Group, which is focusing on developing and refining budget process designs across key process areas.  Their objective is to design and document future state processes based on industry-leading practices and improvement opportunities identified during previous efforts with Adaptive. 

We'll highlight more of this group's efforts in the coming weeks, so check back for more information. 

Adaptive Planning is one of the four parts of FST -- read more here!

From Deloitte to Disney to UVA: UVAFinance welcomes Kathryn McGovern

From L to R:  Mickey,
McGovern, Minnie ;)

When Kathryn McGovern joined the Financial Reporting & Operations team as a Senior Accountant early this year, she was not only making a move from Orlando, Florida but also she was making a move into academia from one of the most well-recognized names in the hospitality industry:  the Walt Disney Company.

Prior to joining UVAFinance, McGovern had worked for over three years as a financial analyst in the Disney Cruise Line and the Disney Vacation Club.   During her time at Disney, McGovern says she not only honed her accounting skills but also, learned to cultivate partnerships with other departments in the company. 

This focus on teamwork was an extension of McGovern's experience at Deloitte, where she began her career, and where, she says, she learned to think of her colleagues as stakeholders and clients.   

"I got a solid foundation in teamwork at Deloitte," she says, adding that "they helped me learn how to best get what I needed to be successful while at the same time helping others get what they need as well."

McGovern and her younger brother (a fourth-
year at UVA) on a safari trek at Animal
Kingdom (McGovern's favorite Disney park)

McGovern's expertise and experience provide a solid foundation now in her role at UVA, as she is already jumping in with both feet on a number of fronts, including documentation of key state processes and deliverables, helping with the implementation of new GASB regulations, and much more.  In addition to the work she's doing within the UVAFinance team, she also expects to be involved with the Finance Strategic Transformation project soon.

When she's not working, McGovern (who is still a Disney fan, by the way!) and her friends enjoy coming together via Zoom to do yoga -- she recommends Yoga with Adriene on YouTube:  "Adriene has classes that fit any skill level, and her very cute dog is in a lot of the videos."  

And, like the rest of us, McGovern has found new shows to binge-watch during the pandemic; she and her family have recently gotten into the 16-episode series "Crash Landing on You," available on NetFlix.

A Symphony of Numbers: UVAFinance Welcomes Lorraine Keuling

Lorraine Keuling's world has always been a mix of musical notes and numbers.  

A self-proclaimed music geek, she has played the bassoon since the eighth grade, played the flute in marching band during high school, and until recently, performed with the Charlottesville Symphony. 

Keuling has a BS in Accounting from the Virginia Commonwealth University and also has a degree in Hospitality Entrepreneurship from J Sargeant Reynolds Community College.  Her professional experience includes accounting positions at the Caton Companies and WorldStrides prior to joining UVA.

Keuling's performing days have taken somewhat of a back seat as she adjusts to her new role in UVAFinance as Senior Accountant in Financial Reporting & Operations.  

In her role for about a month now,  Keuling has been delving into fixed asset accounting to start but will be transitioning into other duties as time goes on. 

The variety of tasks that make up her job was one of the things that attracted Keuling to the position, she says -- that, as well as the opportunities UVA provides to take your expertise and experience and do many interesting things.

"I've really enjoyed learning the different processes in Fixed Accounting, like putting POs together, identifying assets, setting up tags, and so on," she says.   Keuling's work in Fixed Assets has already taken her to some interesting places, including the mass spectrometry lab of Dr. Erin Jeffrey.

In addition to learning the ropes in UVAFinance, Keuling is also deep in the intensive process of studying for the CPA exam.  She has relocated the stress relief she once found in the orchestra pit to the kitchen, where she enjoys trying out new, adventurous recipes.  

She and her dog, Luna, also enjoy decompressing down by the lake. 

Finance Compliance uses the Force (Salesforce)

As a part of their work constructing a future-state service model for UVAFinance, the Finance Engagement Team is steadily bringing all UVAFinance departments into the Salesforce fold. Read more about that effort here on the blog.

Today we check in with Lynn Galasso, who is using Salesforce to manage and track her workload related to ARMICS (what's ARMICS, you might be asking? It's a big part of the work of Finance Outreach and Compliance!):

At the beginning of each year, I formalize the areas of UVA I'll be testing for ARMICS compliance. This year, Andrew Sallans showed me how I might be able to use Salesforce to track progress and keep everyone in the loop. I'm not necessarily a person who's used to new technology, so learning a new platform and navigating it has been my biggest challenge -- but Andrew is a wonderful resource, and he's made sure I know how to capture what I need. Once we set up templates, I don't have to retype or cut and paste, and I can also easily see who has interacted with my notices and who has completed the process. It's also easy for me to report back on where we are. It's also been great for accountability to me personally since I can easily see the status of all of my tasks and my timeline all at once.

Spoken like a Salesforce Jedi!  

Keep watching the UVAFinance blog for more updates on our journey toward a future state service model. 

Welcoming Andrew Moomaw to Financial Reporting and Operations

UVAFinance is pleased to welcome Andrew Moomaw to Financial Reporting & Operations in the role of Accounting & Financial Analyst.  On the team since July, Moomaw has been working with investment accounting and central accounts receivable.

The Moomaws

An alum of JMU, Moomaw has a BBA in Business Management and comes to UVA most recently from DuPont Community Credit Union, where he worked in a variety of senior member advisor and management roles for over 12 years.   

Moomaw made the transition from banking to academia out of his desire to grow professionally.  Although as many would attest, it isn't easy to start a new role at a new organization during a pandemic, Moomaw says his team has been very welcoming and supportive.  He's also pleased to report that the positive reviews of his aunt and uncle, who are longtime UVA employees, are corroborated by his experience. 

Between their two boys, Cooper and Nolan, who are ages 3 and 5, and Ella, their Border Collie/Jack Russell Terrier mix dog, Moomaw and his wife Allie have a lot of pent-up energy in their household. 

He's looking forward to spring for T-Ball season and barbecue season (he's somewhat of a connoisseur, with three smokers of his own).

LSP Tip: Reduce Eye Fatigue

Are your eyes strained or tired from staring at your screen all day?

Here are some tips from an American Academy of Ophthalmology article. Try them out and see if they work for you. Your eyes may thank you.

• Every 20 minutes look at an object 20 feet away for at least 20 seconds. (The 20-20-20 rule)
• Sit at least 25 inches (arm's length) from your screen
• Reduce the brightness of your screen

Most devices (Laptops, Phones, & Tablets) have settings you can configure to reduce brightness.

For Windows devices, you can go to your start button or search bar and enter bright and look for the following:

There is a bar slide you can use to adjust the brightness for each of your displays.

You can further adjust your display brightness by using the Night light setting below the slide bar. Or go to your start button or search bar and enter night and then look for the following:

Within the Night light setting, you can set the strength and a schedule.