University of Washington's Workday woes leave research grants in limbo Hundreds of research grants are stuck in processing limbo as the University of Washington continues to grapple with its $340 million implementation of Workday software. The US West Coast institution, a top recipient of federal funding, has spent more than five years shifting 850 legacy tech to a centralized cloud-based SaaS …
Typical QA-less implementation and deployment, no doubt. Not that this doesn't fall on deaf ears. But there is literally a field of people who specialize in making sure software works as advertised, as well as who can make sure software integrates with a heterogeneous system. And nobody is hiring us because they say we're not worth the money.
I don't think you'd need to be a specialist to realise that it would be a good idea to run parallel with just one initial transfer from the legacy system to see if it works,pull back if it doesn't and only proceed to the next when you're sure its working.
Quotes such as "the necessary migration to Workday from our old legacy systems" suggests over-commitment to their chosen solution. It may have been necessary to migrate from their legacy systems. Migrating to something that's causing that much hold-up to paying invoices and processing research grants is very much not necessary.
With the TA's tied down to the track as usual, and the train expected in 5 minutes. My university can't pay grad-students and TA's on time to the nearest month in any average semester, so this is just business as usual.
If management or their PA's aren't getting paid -- that would be off track.
"It is not uncommon for a technology shift of this size to introduce complex issues."
Yes, but because the same clowns are involved with every fucking time.
Sales people talking bollocks to senior management who lap up "it will make you richer" promises while completely ignoring the people that have to use and implement the car crash of a system.
Really starting to think that any company looking to migrate to one of these big name products... SAP, Oracle, Workday, whatever... needs to include a rider in the contract that the vendor guarantees the project will be completed on time and on budget, with all promised functionality working, or they will eat any overages, plus pay compensation for lost business, and/or increased expenses, for the client. Otherwise, you're basically handing the vendor a blank check, and we've all seen how that movie plays out more than once.
I simply cannot fathom how they don't.
And yet, they really don't. But then, I've also worked for companies that DID have a lot of SLAs for their suppliers and vendors contracts and yet failed to enforce them and I was severely reprimanded for suggesting they should.
And that's how I learned the dirty truth about kickbacks and their stunning, yet hidden scale of prevalence.
... shifting 850 legacy tech to a centralized cloud-based SaaS finance and HR system.
1. Since when is "The Cloud" centralised?
2. What good reason is there to shift quote-legacy-unquote systems if they still do the job and are still properly supported? Decades ago, I wrote a little R/BASIC program to export a small non-profit org's financial data from their fund-raising-tracking software package into Quickbooks. The client is still using it, and our company never got a support call about it.
Switch all services to paper-based, to keep them running. Alongside this, implement the tech. It may take 10 years, it may be millions over budget. It doesn't matter. The paper-based system will be working and cheap. When you have spent a tonne of cash, updated your hardware a couple of times, sorted out the legacy data, and retrained several generations of staff, and it actually works, if that point is ever reached, you can switch away from paper.
So you will have a cheap, fully operational paper-based system, all whilst spending tonnes of money of tech, without missing an invoice (even if your tech never works).
A few years back, I was involved in a Workday migration that was exactly this. The Workday business model is such that "ThirdPartyManagementCo" (in this case a French-sounding D-word) comes in to "guide" the client through the "migration," freeing the Workday team to work their magic. In other words, the client does ALL of the implementation. The Workday people were useless. At one point they had SEVEN live, world-facing copies of the full HR and payroll DBs. This we were told, was because moving to an updated database required a completely new copy of the existing one. And even the new "version" took weeks to implement. They allowed no visibility into their codebase, so QA is a matter of reviewing the running (sometimes) application.
In a meeting, I asked a Workday dev/rep/shill if they would please make the headers in their tables align centered vertically, 'cause they looked like ass. They told me no, it was too difficult. They were unimpressed when I told them I could do it in DevTools (although, not in seconds, as the CSS was utterly effed) and they told me to be quiet, the important people were talking.
I attempted to tell management that this simply "isn't how it's done," and that they were wasting time and money, and was rather impolitely told to STFU, this is the future. Their payroll system had to be reverted to the old, supposedly broken one monthly, but I got paid on time as I was a contractor. As far as I know that company is still working on it. *smiles*
At $dayjob we switched to Workday about two years ago. It went pretty seamlessly for me, but I'm not at the pointy end of anything Workday related.
We did have some glitches with holidays. Workday thought that we had a certain minor holiday off, even though we did not (not at our location, other locations did have that day off). If you actually wanted to take a vacation day on that holiday, Workday would not let you do so, since it thought you were already off. Early this year, it was announced that starting this year, we will have that day off.
Informal asking around confirmed my suspicion, it was easier to just give us all the day off than it would be to "fix" Workday.
About seven years ago my ex-employer (I retired last year) implemented Workday. Amidst messaging that it would "empower" staff with "self-service", it meant that something that used to require a quick call or email to HR would now require a series of incomprehensible navigations to do the thing that you wanted to do.
Within a few months, people figured out that, due to an error in how Holiday hours were calculated, you could take 240 hours of Holiday and only get charged for 180. Good times.
20 or 25 years ago I lived through a similar university upset. I think my school was running out of punch-cards (yes, they still used cards near the end). The only thing different is no pandemic shutdown (I do remember a measles flare), and our school did keep the payroll going, even for the low-caste TAs (probably a screwup). Vendors cut us off. I remember paying for audiotapes out of pocket.
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