It’s not every day that William & Mary’s Chief Technology Officer Corinne Picataggi meets up with Reveley the Griffin, the school’s mascot, for a spin around campus in a golf cart. In May, Picataggi had the opportunity to surprise colleagues across offices and celebrate “Pencils Down,” a major milestone shepherding in the final phase of Workday’s implementation at the university.  

William & Mary successfully launched Workday this summer, following a year of preparation by more than 200 employees across the university. Designed with the needs of higher education in mind, Workday is a unified, cloud-based Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system that allows the university to seamlessly integrate finance, human resources, and payroll into a single user-friendly platform, enhancing the employee experience.  

President Katherine A. Rowe congratulated the project team at a launch celebration on July 17. 

“You have achieved a 20-year play for William & Mary,” Rowe said. “When you give people tools that work well, you reduce conflict. You increase people’s satisfaction in their jobs. Most importantly, you protect and value human time. You communicate in every way that the work they do matters.” 

Optimizing excellence 

At the end of 2022, the university embarked on what Chief Information Officer Ed Aractingi called “the transformative journey of the ERP modernization project” as part of William & Mary’s Vision 2026 commitment to “evolve to excel.” 

Over time, the university is consolidating the current ecosystem of technology solutions provided by multiple vendors with the broader and more comprehensive suite of services offered by Workday. 

Aractingi, Executive Vice President for Finance & Administration Mike Todd and Provost Peggy Agouris serve as executive sponsors for the project. Picataggi is the program manager and leads the core project team of more than 70 staff from finance, human resources (HR), payroll, and information technology (IT). 

Aractingi credits the successful launch of Workday to the sincere and collaborative spirit among all involved. “Everyone, from executive leadership to the team members, approached the project with the mindset that a big lift is ahead of us and we can do it if we work together, so they rose to the occasion with determination and teamwork,” he said. “It was a clear indication of not just talent, but dedication and commitment.” 

Aractingi also emphasized the level of trust required from the highest levels of leadership. “Having the full support of President Rowe and the Board of Visitors was remarkable and crucial for success.”  

“This is a whole university project,” Picataggi added. “We knew this would impact every employee on campus in some capacity. One of the first things we did as a team was to establish a group of stakeholders across the university to help manage the change and create a bi-directional feedback loop throughout the lifecycle of the project.”  

Building teams across the university 

To accomplish a successful integration across the entire university, implementing Workday required intentional change management. 

“Prior to this initiative, no one at the university was focused solely on change management; responsibilities were split, and we lacked a training team,” explained Erin Fryer, director of communications & organizational change lead for W&M IT. 

The university created a distributed change management team drawn from W&M’s IT, HR, and finance divisions. The team’s combined experience at William & Mary exceeds 100 years and leverages expertise in communications, project management, leadership, client support, and training. Fryer said the team’s experience was essential for stakeholder analysis and developing communications and training plans, as well as the support model post-launch. 

Ahead of the official launch on July 1, the project team spent more than 300 hours on training in the new system. The change management team held approximately 30 Q&A sessions, readiness workshops and town halls. A training sub-team created more than 80 job aids as well as numerous videos, webinars and in-person sessions to provide on-demand guidance for W&M employees.  

That’s not all — the university also established the Workday Change Network, made up of about 100 employees from across campus, to foster two-way communication between various departments and the project team. Members of the Change Network, or Change Ambassadors, played a crucial role in helping colleagues in their areas prepare for and embrace Workday. Change Ambassadors were the first line of employees outside of the project team to understand and disseminate information about business processes, policies and system changes.  

Aractingi praised the W&M Workday project teams for their collaborative excellence. 

“We built a core example of intense collaboration and partnership across campus that is unique and unprecedented. This was not a single department; it was not two departments. It was almost the entire university,” he said. “We had dozens of people working daily and hundreds of people involved in one way or another. And now thousands are using the system.”  

Evolving for impact

Although she thrives on challenges, Becca Marshall, fiscal and administrative coordinator for the mathematics department, was admittedly nervous about a new system.  

“Along with new adventures comes a whole new list of things to learn. I’m old school. In other words, paper documentation is my security blanket,” Marshall said.  

Reassurance and consistent communication from the change management and project teams helped, Marshall added.  

Now, said Marshall, “Workday is reorganizing everything into one place. The sophistication level will allow for quicker response, and it will catch more errors on the front end. It also eliminates the plethora of hands-on approvals needed prior to Workday, thereby removing bottlenecks in the process. Once all the final issues are ironed out, William & Mary will be in a much better place with the business processes than we have ever been. I’m looking forward to it.” 

Since the launch on July 1, W&M’s Workday teams continue to refine the system and address various issues that occur with such major system implementations.  

“Bumps in the road were not unexpected,” said Picataggi. “They’re part of the process we follow and allow us to maximize system optimization and efficiency. We’re leveraging our collaborative environments in the stabilization and refining phase, just like we did during implementation.” 

Employees are encouraged to submit feedback and questions through the Workday Support Portal. The change management team sends targeted communications, posts in the W&M Digest regularly and updates resources like job aids as needed. The change management team also created the “Workday Watch,” a weekly email newsletter that gathers answers to common questions and shares timely information to all faculty and staff. 

“A challenge of systems we used in the past was the difficulty of integration and updates. We are now in a more cohesive and unified system that is updated seamlessly twice a year,” said Aractingi. “The modern world is phone-centric, cloud-based, and allows access anywhere, anytime from any device. We are now able to do that. We are in a single system doing multiple functions now, and our capabilities will grow alongside Workday’s.”  

Leading innovation 

William & Mary factored collaboration with other universities into the Workday project from the start. 

“How could other schools leverage the work we’ve done?” Picataggi said. “We deliberately recorded everything that we have done. We’ve put many of our town halls in shared public spaces, like YouTube, and we’ve communicated with other universities.”  

Aractingi also expressed gratitude to the many universities the team interviewed during the planning phase. 

“Everyone we consulted with gave us input and ideas to ‘watch for this’ and ‘here’s how it’s going to look when you go live,’” he said. “That preparation gave us confidence and a better understanding of what to expect.”  

And now, Aractingi said, the knowledge building, best practices, and change management lessons W&M’s people accomplished have not only radically improved the university’s operational capabilities but also amplified individual expertise.  

“We have people now who have become experts in work beyond their previous roles,” he said. “When we started, we were going out and asking for lessons learned. Now, we’re being asked for our lessons learned, because we have done it, and we’ve done it successfully.”