This preparatory stage involves setting expectations & laying the foundation for the work ahead. Key activities during this phase include:

• Questionnaires: Key stakeholders will be sent questionnaires ahead of their group sessions, to gather preliminary information.
• Overview Sessions: Alchemy will host conversations with individual functional groups, reviewing expectations and facilitating high-level discussions about business processes.
• Workspace Orientation: Alchemy will provide training in key technical resources that will be used throughout the project.

This initial stage focuses on formally kicking off the project, initiating Workday training, and proceeding with formal planning. Key activities during this phase include:

• Discovery Sessions: Alchemy will hold conversations with Swarthmore's functional leads and subject matter experts to understand current operations and terminology. This will help identify gaps between our current processes and Workday's capabilities.
• Foundation Data Model (FDM) Sessions: Team members will begin to design the data model that will be used across the entire Workday platform. This includes mapping our current chart of accounts to the new "Worktags" system in Workday.
• Foundation Tenant Build: Alchemy will build the first instance of Swarthmore's Workday environment, known as the "Foundation Tenant". This build will be based on Alchemy and Workday's best practices and the information gathered during the discovery and FDM sessions.

During this stage, the project team will work on aligning Swarthmore's specific needs with Workday's configuration and building out the system's functionalities. Key activities include:

• Foundation Alignment Sessions (FAS): The team will review the default configurations in the Workday tenant and decide whether to accept, change, or add values to meet our long-term needs.
• Unit Testing & Integrations Prototype: The technical teams will develop and test individual aspects of Workday in a silo (separately from other aspects of the system), and will test integrations with our other existing systems.
• End-to-End Data Conversion & Tenant Build: Full sets of our required data will be prepared for conversion into the Workday system.

This stage is dedicated to rigorous evaluation of the configured system to ensure it meets our requirements and functions correctly. The main activities are:

• Parallel Testing: For six weeks, we will run processes in both Workday and our legacy system (Banner) to compare results and ensure accuracy.
• Knowledge Transfer Sessions/Scenarios: Test scenarios will be used to confirm system administrator knowledge & document workflows.
• User Readiness Review (URR): A broader group of end-users will execute test scenarios to validate the system and provide feedback on training materials before the full rollout.

The final stage involves moving the tested and approved system into a live production environment for the entire community to use. Key activities include:

• Final Data Conversion: The final data from our legacy systems will be loaded into Workday.
• Go-Live: The Workday system will become the official system of record for the respective functional areas.
• Post-Production Support: For four weeks following the go-live date, Alchemy will provide support with any issues that arise. After this period, the Swarthmore project team will be responsible for ongoing support and maintenance.