No One Workdays Alone: Solving Challenges Together in Workday Student

Ever felt overwhelmed by Workday Student? You’re not alone. And, more importantly, you’re not supposed to be! Workday Student isn’t something you can navigate alone. The system demands a level of collaboration that’s only possible in team cultures where it’s safe to acknowledge uncertainty and where helping each other isn’t an interruption, it’s a superpower.

I learned the power of collaborative decision-making during my 11 years in a registrar’s office at a small college in Maine. We had a saying: N.O.R.A., “No One Registrars Alone,” because the academic policies and technical processes within just one institution are far too complex for any one person to know them all.  Anytime one of us faced a complicated decision, we’d say, “I need a NORA,” and we’d quickly put our heads together to make the best decision that our combined knowledge and experience allowed.

That saying represents the power of collective wisdom for solving complicated problems and the beauty of knowing other people have your back. I am bringing that same power and beauty to everyone in the Workday Student world because I believe that N.O.W.A.—“No One Workdays Alone,” is how we practice the cross-functionality the system demands. It’s the mantra for normalizing the concept that no one person is supposed to know it all, that everyone needs help, and every solution needs a second set of eyes.

Workday Student is vast and impossible to fully master on your own. That’s why we never do anything in a production environment for the first time and why we test, test, test everything first. It’s also the primary reason we need N.O.W.A. — often, there is more than one option to accomplish your goal in Workday Student and sometimes, as we say in Maine, “you can’t get there from here” at all.

It doesn’t matter how many Workday certifications you have or how many calculated fields you’ve built, there are things you don’t know about how Student works let alone how it works within the context of each institution’s chosen configuration within Workday’s constantly evolving architecture. Layer on the differences across types of colleges/universities, varying federal and state regulations, and the hundreds of possible third-party integrations and you begin to see the temptation to give into the intimidation of the unknown and remain isolated in your fear. Don’t do it! The way forward is together with tenacity and creative thinking.

Keep in mind that Workday Student is very young compared to other higher education ERP software solutions. Most of the solutions that dominate today’s market were born in the late 1990s and have decades of refinement behind them. Workday Student, on the other hand, launched in 2016 and is evolving rapidly, but it’s still maturing. That evolution brings opportunity—but also complexity and challenges that must be overcome. What “couldn’t be done” 6 months ago may very well be possible now because Workday is always listening to clients and consultants alike and trying to improve the product.  If we keep working together to make it better, just imagine what Workday Student will grow up to be?

That’s a lovely thing to imagine, but the reality of today is that the process of improving can be uncomfortable and even when Workday Student works “as designed,” it might not work for your institution’s unique needs.  That’s where collaboration—and creative workarounds—become your most valuable tools, but what does it mean to collaborate in Workday Student?

Every institution of higher education and every consultant firm must define N.O.W.A. internally, but externally, we should all be logging into Workday Community everyday—no matter how busy we are!

Community is the place where anyone in the Workday world can post a question that can be seen and answered by other users, consultants, and Workmates, e.g., the staff at Workday. Workmates and Workday gurus are able to collaborate, network, and problem solve on solutions together. #N.O.W.A.

Community is also the place where the documentation lives. No, it isn’t exhaustive documentation, but don’t ignore it because it isn’t perfect. You won’t know if something is “working as designed” if you don’t educate yourself about the design.

Community is all of that and more, but it’s not typically real-time support or collaboration. What else is there? For institutions, there are also user groups, typically regional, that you should join and actively participate in. For consultants, there are product lead forums and the occasional KSS, knowledge sharing session. We should all attend the Workday Rising conference when possible and everyone should find and follow users and consultants on LinkedIn to form connections and learn tips and tricks. Institutions also have the opportunity to submit requests, in Community, for formal help from Workday, but that takes time. How do you get help quickly?

Well, that’s where consultants come in—especially post-production support contracts with a defined cadence of response times. It’s not because we know everything, I think we can agree that’s impossible, but because when you N.O.W.A. with a professional consultant, you are co-designing solutions with the increased benefit of our combined knowledge and experience.

Sometimes those solutions are custom reports or integrations. Sometimes those solutions are adopting newly released features or modifying business process definitions. And sometimes, they are good old fashioned workarounds born from years of wrestling with things that work as designed, testing ideas, and fixing mistakes (mistakes we all learn from).

As Kognitiv’s Student Summer Success blog series wraps up, here are a few useful work-around solutions to remind you all that you’re not alone and we can find a way forward together:

1. Mass Waitlisting. You can “mass waitlist” students, which is crucial for testing, by selecting the “enable waitlisting” option within Mass Register Students. With this one task, you can fill up course sections and populate waitlists to facilitate testing of waitlisting and how it interacts with eligibility rules, reserved seating, and multiple required instructional formats.
2. Anti-Requisites. Use the small but mighty “excludes” button when creating Student Eligibility Rules to make “anti-requisites.” I love it for combination rules around tricky requirements, e.g., students with X test score and Y transfer credit in Z program of study can’t take this class.
   1. Note: some places in Workday Student display the name of an eligibility rule and some places display the meaning of the eligibility rule. Both can be customized, but neither truly represents the logic of the rule—that’s only visible inside the rule itself.
3. Straight-to-Waitlist Model. If your institution has any high demand classes without clear prerequisites/eligibility rules, consider a “straight to waitlist” registration model. When registration opens, have waitlist capacity but no section capacity which prevents anyone from registering but allows students to waitlist. From there, administrators can edit the waitlist order appropriately, add the number of actual seats available, and the waitlist offers will fire off in the determined order as soon as the course section change event is approved. Security can be configured to allow and prevent access to the relevant tasks as needed.

In the spirit of, “No One Workdays Alone,” I asked Melissa Ginelli and Brittany Peterson, two of my fabulous Workday Student consultant colleagues who focus on student financials and financial aid, for examples of work arounds for their product areas. Per the usual, they did not fail to deliver:

• Scholarship Administration. Leverage Student Cohorts to administer institutional scholarships. Track students who’ve applied for a scholarship via an application outside of Workday in a way that can be easily viewed, reported, and referenced to create eligibility or amount calculations for Student Award items to facilitate automatic awarding.
  • For larger scholarship programs or scholarship programs with more complex initial eligibility and/or renewal requirements, consider using a custom object on the financial aid period record as opposed to a student cohort. This route enables institutions to reap all the benefits of using a cohort but can eliminate the need to maintain the cohort.
  • Student Cohorts are an incredibly useful tool and other use cases include Study abroad and consortium agreement tracking.
• Student ID in Search Reports. If your configuration matches Universal ID to Student ID, then you can search with Student ID numbers with an OR or | (pipe) in search reports to return the exact results for which you want to run the process, , e.g., enter 12345678 OR 12345679 in the search bar.
  • This trick works for all search reports, delivered and custom, from Find Student Prospects to Mass Update Student Status to Run Student Financials Processes by Period.
  • If you have the Student IDS in a column in Excel, you can enter the ORs in the subsequent column and copy both columns to paste into the report search. Make sure to remove the final OR in the last student ID will be dropped.

“No One Workdays Alone” is how we find our way through the labyrinth of Workday Student to the place where it transforms the way faculty, staff, and students experience higher education. That place exists, but we can’t get there alone.

Remember: the most powerful tool we have isn’t a report, an integration, or even a workaround, it’s each other.  No matter where you are in your Workday Student journey, the N.O.W.A. mindset can get you where you’re going. Got a challenge you’re trying to work through? Let’s connect.

Check out the full Student Summer Success Series Here:

1. Advisory Support is the Secret Ingredient in your Workday Student Cake
2. Quality in, Quality Out: Getting Data Conversion Right in Workday Student
3. The T.E.S.T.I.N.G. Framework: Your Roadmap to Workday Student Readiness