Common questions

We're nearing the end of our discovery and design phases, and we'll soon begin seeing that effort come to life in our second Workday prototype. As we move through summer, we'll be able to start sharing what that looks like in practical terms, and work with Change Advocates to start diving deeper into key areas.

A huge range of operational and academic staff have been involved in our in-depth workshops since we kicked them off last year. We've now expanded that representation to all communities through the Change Network, who'll act as your local engagement route as we move into the training phase. A huge thank you from all of us.

Change affects us all differently, and can raise a mixture of emotions – especially when we don't yet have all the answers. Our existing change and wellbeing resources, including our employee-assistance programme, can help you through that uncertainty. If you're a line manager, they also include resources to support you leading others through periods of change.

In practice, the move to 'direct access' means you might be doing certain tasks that you currently ask someone else to do for you. This might seem like added effort, but the reality should showcase the time it'll save you – nothing 'lost in translation' through emails, no waiting in queues for requests to be dealt with, the ability to see dashboards and reports in a couple of clicks. We'll be able to demonstrate more later this year.

It's true that there are savings targets from the transformation. We're taking the opportunity to manage York's evolving needs over the next five years as people naturally retire or progress to new roles. This means not recruiting new staff for areas of work that become more automated, while making sure the staff doing those tasks right now can focus more of their time on their specialisms.

Workday has plenty of AI functionality – around recruitment, for example – but we’ve deliberately chosen not to blindly enable it from the outset. We're weighing up the risks and benefits, and we'll keep doing so until long after we've all adjusted to our new processes. At which point, we’ll have a lot more concrete evidence to determine what we activate – and, importantly, the guidelines in place to use it ethically in any scenario.

We're confident it will. We've faced past examples of implementing technology with fixed workflows, which have then fallen short of expectations. This time, we're co-creating with staff at all levels to fully analyse our processes and policies, which allows us to configure the platform around the most effective ways of working. We can't promise everyone everything – but we will be in a position to continuously refine after we go live.

We'll be adopting best practice across our processes and policies wherever possible, but everyone's insights are proving vital to make sure that any changes will work for the University and subsidiaries as a whole. The workstream teams – HR; finance; data and tech; and change management – are discussing them every week to guide the more nuanced decisions, and to readjust where we need to.

This was a big factor in the lengthy procurement process to decide what would best suit our needs. While there are some benefits of being able to bounce between emerging platforms, it comes with plenty of costs and complications. The partnership York and Workday are creating means we'll benefit from constant developments and new functionality from an established, integrated world-leader for the long term.

It's a significant financial investment. But it will cost a lot less than renewing all the expiring systems we currently use – not to mention the staff time spent grappling with them. I've been leading the cost-benefit analysis around the transformation, and we expect it to save us £36m over the next 14 years.