Guiding Principles
Wake Forest University has chosen to implement the Workday Student Information System (SIS) to support Wake’s teaching, learning and scholarly work while continually improving service to its students, faculty and staff. Wake Forest academic units will be part of a unified student system supporting the entire student lifecycle in a way that reflects the academic priorities and community values of our institution. This will be a major step forward, by providing the University with a state of the art system with which to continually improve student academic services and business processes. For us to successfully implement this application, we have established a clear set of Goals, Guiding Principles and Project Team Commitments that outline key criteria for making decisions in timely and cost-effective ways while still meeting essential requirements of Wake Forest University.
The Executive Sponsor and Project Steering Committee endorse these Guiding Principles. In general, unless there is a significant and compelling reason to deviate from them, these principles take precedence in all project planning and decision-making. Only the Executive Sponsor or Project Steering Committee are empowered to determine if a proposed exception meets “significant and compelling” criteria, and no exception is permitted without the Executive Sponsor agreement.
Guiding Principles
The impact of our implementation extends well beyond the technology itself. By designing our end-to-end processes through an innovative lens, we can touch and transform the Wake Forest experience, to allow for continued long-term growth and position ourselves to realize our strategic priorities. In pursuit of these goals, we prioritize the following guiding principles:
- One Wake Forest: We will proceed with the ‘One Wake Forest’ mindset in encouraging all schools and programs to implement common procedural standards and data categories, even while their specific application may vary.
- Workday First: We will look to Workday first, configuring and deploying features and functionality delivered by Workday before looking to other systems or integrations.
- Streamline Processes: We will seek to configure then implement best practices and procedures as recommended and delivered by Workday and our implementation partner. We will seek to adjust processes to the product and not the other way around.
- Consider Strategy: We will examine both long-term benefits and costs of our decisions, and consider how system implementation will enhance the competitiveness of Wake Forest programs and experiences in an increasingly challenging and complex higher education environment.
Goals of the Project
- Implement consistent and efficient processes that enhance service and improve student experience across the University.
- Preserve the security and integrity of data with systems that secure access to data based on role.
- Provide easy to use tools and technologies that promote adoption and provide a high quality user experience.
- Provide accurate and consistently defined data to support decision-making and reporting.
- Provide training to ensure that users leverage full and available functionality of the system and demonstrate how the newly designed workflows will improve productivity and efficiency.
Project Team Commitments
As a member of the project team, I will:
- Be transparent, collaborative, and assume virtuous intent on the part of my teammates
- Leverage the project and governance structure to make decisions efficiently
- Respectfully speak up if I don’t understand something or have a concern
- Actively pursue innovations and maintain an openness to change
When making decisions, I will frame them by considering whether the action:
- Advances priorities for equity and inclusion
- Enhances the student and faculty experience
- Provides long-term, sustainable benefits
- Can best be accomplished via Workday