[raflanagan@frostburg.edu]

Good afternoon, Eric,

First, my condolences on transitioning to Workday. We began transitioning from PeopleSoft last July, and it has been a challenging transition to say the least. We also found the provided videos and job aids to be less than helpful, and unfortunately, we don’t have any good documentation to share.

Within our department, once one of us learned how to do a specific task in Workday, we got together and walked each other through the task.

We’re approaching the one-year mark, and there are still issues that are unresolved, particularly with regard to onboarding new hires and the data integration with IT systems for account provisioning and creation, in addition to many others.

We transitioned at the University System of Maryland level with six or so institutions on the same system, which likely complicated things vs. doing so at an institution level, so here’s hoping your experience is smoother than ours has been.

[Eric Margiotta]

Many thanks Allen!

Splitting things up across the office makes sense, nice to hear it’s working (as much as it can).

It’s also super helpful to know where some of the stumbling blocks have been so I can try to be prepared.

I’ve also heard that student staff can be difficult to hire/transition over.

Thanks again!

[Benjamin Perlman]

Eric,

I second all of Allen’s sentiments. Here it’s tough to understand what job aids are being made locally and what are provided by the vendor, but we also haven’t found them to be super helpful.

A strategy to add that I’ve found useful: seeking help in this area is the best use I’ve found for AI at work so far. I’ll type in “How do I do X in Workday?” and ChatGPT or Gemini will give me a pretty decent step-by-step answer. I then copy this into a Word document for reference later if I need it again.

My pet theory is that the AI runs through publicly available job aids to determine the most likely steps that can be universalized across institutions. Whether that’s the case or not, it seems to work better than many of the job aids I’m provided, which are also challenging to search and sift through (in our instance of Workday at least).

Good luck on the transition. Maybe we can meet up at conference and have an “I miss PeopleSoft” support group.”

Ben

[Eric Margiotta]

Hey Ben!

The job aids I’ve seen have felt pre-made (by Workday) though the ones our IT team has put out strike a similar “too basic to be useful” tone.

Interesting theory and I will 1000% be using the AI method to help get us situated. I’m glad it works. I wonder if it also has to do with how AI is used as part of Workday. Workday doesn’t really advertise how much they’re using AI for all of our campus systems,

I’ll come to the support group anytime! We didn’t even have People Soft, we had a hodgepodge of Banner Finance, PeopleAdmin, and other stuff which probably explains why we were looking for a better solution.

Thanks for your help!