Campus Spotlight: Portland Community College

Institutional Moment

Strengthening Adoption

Institution Snapshot

Institution: Portland Community College

Institution Type: Public Community College

Location: Portland, Oregon

Technology Initiative: Workday HR/Finance and Workday Student

Engagement Style: User Experience Strategy and Adoption Readiness Support

Engagement Length: Ongoing Advisory

Make Workday Work the Way Administrative Staff Work

After going live with Workday HCM and Finance, Portland Community College identified a challenge familiar to many institutions: the system was working, but some of its most frequent users were spending too much time figuring out how to work within it.

Administrative assistants were particularly affected. They were power users whose jobs crossed both HCM and Finance. In PCC's previous system, Banner, they had spent years learning where to go, what terminology meant, and how to complete their work. Banner was complicated, but it was familiar. Experienced employees had developed expertise they could pass along to new colleagues.

Workday changed that overnight.

Now everyone was learning new terminology, new navigation, new security access, and new ways of completing familiar work. At the same time, Workday was organized largely around its functional areas rather than around the way an administrative assistant's day actually unfolded.

PCC could have treated this as something employees simply needed more time and training to overcome. Instead, the college explored a different question: Could Workday be designed to better reflect how these employees actually work?

You Might Be Here If...

• Employees regularly work across multiple areas of Workday.

• Frequent tasks take too many clicks to find and complete.

• Users need to know Workday terminology to find familiar activities.

• Staff rely on job aids stored separately from where they complete the work.

• Employees are unsure about the correct process or how their work connects to other roles.

• Users encounter access or security issues but are not sure where to go for help.

• Training exists, but employees still find everyday Workday activities difficult to navigate.

  
  

The Challenge

Moving from a legacy ERP changes more than technology. It resets years of accumulated institutional knowledge.

PCC's administrative assistants knew how to get their jobs done in Banner. That did not mean Banner was simple. It meant employees had spent years developing expertise around its complexity. They knew the terminology, understood the shortcuts and workarounds, and knew whom to ask when something went wrong. When new employees joined, experienced staff could teach them. After Workday go-live, much of that accumulated knowledge no longer applied.

Familiar activities had new names. Processes worked differently. Security had to be translated from the old environment into Workday's security model. Employees sometimes did not know whether they lacked access to something, were searching in the wrong place, or were misunderstanding the new process. Those are normal challenges during the transition to a new ERP, but they have a real effect on employees.

Administrative assistants were particularly impacted because of the breadth of their responsibilities. A single day might involve purchasing, payroll, employee information, job requisitions, expenses, reports, and other activities spanning both HCM and Finance. Yet Workday's functionality was generally organized by those product and functional areas, not around the administrative assistant's job.

Job aids helped explain individual activities, but they created another challenge. Employees had to know which job aid they needed, find it outside the work they were doing, follow the instructions, and then return to Workday. The documentation could explain the steps without necessarily helping employees understand how the overall process worked or where their responsibility fit.

The result was not one large problem. It was hundreds of small points of friction: extra clicks, unfamiliar terminology, questions about access, uncertainty about process, and repeated searches for instructions. For employees who work in Workday throughout the day, those small issues added up quickly.

The Turning Point

There is a longstanding assumption with ERP systems that users have to adapt to the system. That made sense when technology offered fewer choices. Modern cloud systems such as Workday create another possibility.

Workday provides significant flexibility in how institutions design the user experience. Dashboards, navigation, links, reports, guidance, and other native capabilities can be organized around how people actually perform their jobs. Instead of allowing the structure of the technology to dictate the experience, the institution's real operations can become the starting point.

But flexibility alone does not make a system intuitive.

In fact, a key part of Legato's methodology is reducing options. Workday may provide multiple ways to reach information or complete an activity, but exposing every option to users can recreate the complexity institutions are trying to solve. Legato applies standard principles of web design: use language people recognize, organize information around what they are trying to accomplish, minimize unnecessary choices and clicks, and make the most likely next step obvious.

The goal is not to create more training for navigation. Whenever possible, it is to design an experience that does not require training to navigate in the first place.

For PCC, that changed the question from "How do we get administrative assistants comfortable with Workday?" to "How can we use Workday's flexibility to make their work easier?"

The Partnership

Legato worked directly with PCC's administrative assistants to understand their day-to-day responsibilities and where the transition from Banner to Workday had created the most friction. The administrative assistants were initially skeptical that a dashboard would help. They did not need another page of links or another layer added to an already unfamiliar system. Their perspective changed as the conversation focused on their actual work.

Using native Workday functionality, Legato designed an Administrative Assistant dashboard that brought commonly used tasks, reports, information, and resources into an experience organized for them.

Instead of requiring employees to think in terms of HCM versus Finance, the dashboard organized resources around the work they needed to perform. Plain-language labels helped translate Workday terminology into recognizable concepts. High-level guidance provided orientation, while links to existing job aids made detailed instructions available closer to the point of need.

The experience also helped provide context. Rather than presenting every task as an isolated set of instructions, the design could help employees better understand the larger process, their part in it, and where related activities belonged.

Just as importantly, Legato designed the solution for PCC to own. Legato provided documentation explaining how PCC could maintain and update the user experience itself. Routine changes can typically be made in less than 10 minutes, allowing the experience to evolve as processes, terminology, resources, and user needs change.

The Outcome

The Administrative Assistant dashboard did not solve every challenge PCC's users were experiencing in Workday, nor was that the goal.

Questions about security access, evolving processes, terminology, and broader post-go-live operations still required attention. But PCC did not need to wait until every issue was resolved to make the everyday experience better.

The dashboard provided a practical first step. Frequently used activities became easier to find. Employees had fewer places to navigate, fewer choices to sort through, and less Workday terminology to remember. Guidance was brought closer to the work, helping users better understand both what to do and where to go for additional information.

For administrative assistants working in Workday throughout the day, even modest improvements can add up. Fewer clicks, searches, questions, and trips to separate job aids save time while reducing the frustration of completing routine work.

Importantly, PCC was able to make these improvements quickly and at relatively low cost using native Workday functionality it already owned. Legato also provided documentation so PCC could maintain and update the experience itself, with many routine changes taking less than 10 minutes.

Why This Story Matters

When an institution replaces a system it has used for years, it replaces more than software. It temporarily gives up accumulated expertise.

Employees who knew exactly how to perform their jobs can suddenly become beginners. Security needs to be translated. Familiar processes need to be understood in a new environment. Terminology changes. Informal knowledge and shortcuts disappear. And everyone is learning at roughly the same time, making it harder for experienced employees to teach newer ones. Some of that disruption is unavoidable during an ERP transition. Unnecessary complexity is not.

Workday gives institutions considerable flexibility to shape how employees interact with the system. That creates an opportunity to start with the actual work: what employees are trying to accomplish, the language they use, the information they need, and the sequence in which they need it.

The technology can then be designed around those needs.

PCC's Administrative Assistant dashboard demonstrates what that looks like in practice. Using functionality already available within Workday, PCC created an experience that better reflected how its employees actually worked and that its own team could easily maintain.

The lesson is not that users never need training. Complex processes will always require knowledge and context. But institutions should not have to train employees simply to navigate unnecessary complexity.

Whenever possible, design that complexity out of the experience.