A Baker Tilly reviewer said the Minnesota State NextGen project has been elevated from a 'high' to a 'critical' risk level, citing persistent shortages of people resources and the complexity of connecting the Workday student implementation to ongoing HCM and finance stabilization. The finding was delivered as part of Project Risk Review No. 16 during the Board of Trustees Committee of the Whole on Oct. 22.

Mike Cullen, who has worked on every NextGen risk review, told trustees the most consequential risk is staffing: campuses and the system office lack the consistent expertise needed across HR, finance, IT, change management and connected projects such as a CRM that will feed recruitment and enrollment. "We raised it up to critical," Cullen said, adding that the CRM work and the student prototyping depend on the same limited set of people who are also needed for platform stabilization.

Cullen and Chief Audit Officer Jorgensen framed recommendations in three risk buckets: resource risks (people and contractor models), timeline risks and scope risks. The most urgent actions, Cullen said, are to "surge the people resources for Workday finance," hire a NextGen program director or 'conductor' to coordinate cross-project activity, and make more formal use of the third-party owner's representative (TPOR) and Workday's success-plan resources.

Vice Chancellor Mackey and other system staff said some short-term steps already taken include hiring temporary, Workday-experienced contractors to assist with cash-reconciliation and finance stabilization work; that engagement ran for a planned, roughly three-month period and helped reduce unreconciled differences on system financials. Mackey told the board the team drove unreconciled differences down to about $1.1 million, a figure he called critical for completing fiscal-25 financial statements on schedule.

Trustees pressed for more detail on what "surge" means in headcount and dollars. Cullen and Mackey said the exact mix is still being developed and will be driven by near-term priorities: stabilizing Workday HCM/finance processes to permit reliable financial reporting and then allocating resources to student-phase prototyping and connected projects. Mackey said some positions are already budgeted but not yet filled; additional requests could come from contingency funds or separate asks to reduce system risk.

Board and campus leaders also discussed the balance between stabilizing the finance platform and moving forward with the Workday Student phased rollout planned to begin turning on admissions and recruiting functionality in 2028 and full student live in 2029. "We have contractual obligations with that student phase," Cullen said, cautioning that interconnected projects (CRM, integrations and data-source decisions) complicate any decision to pause.

The board requested more detail and will hear a follow-up report in January. System staff said the board-approved NextGen budget remains $290,400,000 with a $15,000,000 contingency reserved for student implementation events that were not anticipated in the original plan.

What’s next: Baker Tilly and system staff will return with a January update that is expected to detail the proposed program-director role, an estimated staffing plan, timeline implications and any formal budget requests for contingency use.