Workday update: Oregon officials describe rollout problems, staffing plan and budget request

Co-Chair Smith convened the Joint Committee on Ways and Means Subcommittee on General Government on March 20, 2025, for an informational briefing by the Oregon Department of Administrative Services on the statewide Workday human-resources and payroll system.

Barry Leslie, director of the Department of Administrative Services, told the committee the rollout had “been a rocky couple of years” and said, “the buck stops with me,” while introducing a technical briefing from the Workday program team led by Renee Royston and Jody Sherwood.

The presentation laid out the scope of the Workday deployment: a single cloud-based software-as-a-service that now supports HR, payroll, time and attendance, absence management and learning for more than 45,000 state employees across nearly 100 agencies and under about 36 labor agreements. The Workday team said the system also supports roughly 62,000 non-state learners who use online training tied to agency business needs.

Renee Royston, Workday Oregon program director, described Workday as “a…