The Implementation Turnaround Rhodes College Should Be Known For

When Legato joined Rhodes College's Workday Student implementation in September 2022, the project had reached a critical juncture. The architect and configure period was coming to a close with a large amount of work still to complete, and the registrar's concern went deeper than the timeline: her office wasn't yet sure how it would operate in the new system.

That gap between configuration and operational confidence is exactly where implementations tend to lose ground, and closing it became the work of the months ahead.

Protecting the Right Kind of Time

One of the first priorities was protecting the registrar's time for decisions only she could make. With a full operational workload and a March 2023 go-live on the horizon, the registrar couldn't afford to spend her hours clearing initial testing failures that didn't require her judgment.

Working closely with the registrar's data specialist, Legato absorbed roughly 90 percent of the early testing work, documenting what didn't function correctly and resolving what could be resolved without her direct input, so that their time together was spent on the issues that needed her expertise and sign-off.

For moments when the registrar couldn't be present at all, test scenarios were recorded so she could review them on her own schedule and come to meetings with questions rather than starting from scratch.

Where the Technical Work Was the Hardest

Rhodes was migrating from Banner, which carried years of operational logic that didn't translate cleanly into Workday's data model. One of the starkest examples involved class year reporting. Rhodes identifies students by graduation year rather than academic standing, which matters because students with transfer credits might enter with sophomore standing but still plan to graduate with their class four years later.

The implementation partner attempted to solve this through a calculated field that produced numbers that were wrong. Rather than continuing to iterate on an approach that wasn't working, Legato's introduced Workday's powerful cohort functionality as an alternative: criteria-based class year groups that were manageable without deep technical expertise, accessible across the reports and business objects different offices needed, and flexible enough to expand as more teams found uses for them.

The cohorts ended up being one of the most consequential wins of the engagement.

Data work of this kind ran throughout the implementation in parallel with everything else.

For example, Tennessee's TELS GPA reporting requirement demanded enough understanding of how Workday organized academic data to translate it for a financial aid report writer building the calculation from scratch.

Additionally, students with both undergraduate and graduate records presented their own complications since Banner and Workday handled that data model in different ways. A week of validation followed every new tenant build, comparing GPA records, course credits, and enrollment counts in Excel against legacy data to catch what conversion scripts weren't yet getting right.

Building Something People Would Want to Use

Configuration alone wasn't going to make Workday feel like a system the Rhodes community could trust, and the registrar understood this long before go-live.

Student User Experience

The out-of-the-box course search experience required students to scroll through long option lists and make multiple selections that added friction without adding value. A custom report replaced it, hardcoding the parameters that didn't need to change and removing the prompts students would have had to navigate every time.

Registrar User Experience

Role-specific dashboards were built for the registrar's team, organizing daily tasks and surfacing proactive alerts for issues that would require hours of cleanup if left unnoticed, such as students without assigned advisors or courses with reference IDs that hadn't been customized for downstream integrations.

Faculty User Experience

Faculty adoption was treated with the same care.

The faculty fellows who led the advising and curriculum workstreams had developed deep expertise in Workday's academic requirement configuration, and their work became a model worth following at other institutions.

A required faculty training session was designed to leave no one behind, with dashboards built to give faculty something useful from their first login and with Legato working behind the scenes during the session to fix security issues that surfaced in real time, so no faculty member lost time waiting for something to be resolved.

Mock Semester

During the mock semester that preceded go-live, students who hadn't read any documentation sat down, watched a short introductory video, and navigated the system without further guidance. That response confirmed the experience had been designed at the right level.

What Made the Difference in This Workday Implementation

Rhodes College went live in March 2023 and registration worked. Six months earlier, there had been real reason to wonder.

What carried the implementation through was a combination of a committed internal team and a partnership model with Legato built around co-creation rather than vendor dependency. The faculty fellows, the registrar's data specialist, the training team, and the registrar herself brought the institutional knowledge that grounded every decision. Having Legato as a partner who could translate between higher ed operations and Workday's technical language, provided extra capacity when it was needed most, and an advocate for what the institution was trying to achieve making the difference between a go-live that checked boxes and one that left Rhodes with a system they're confident using and still building on today.

If you'd like to talk through what a partnership like this could look like for your institution, the Legato team would love to connect.