Anita Sales, HCM Practice Lead (asales@collaborativesolutions.com)
Anita has over 8 years of experience consulting on Workday HCM, focusing the last two years on Higher Education clients in particular. She has broad experience with Workday engagements, from large multi-phase, multi-year global projects to agile, compressed-timeline deployments. She has supported private and public sector customers across multiple business models in meeting their strategic delivery goals for HCM deployments. Prior to transitioning to consulting, Anita worked over 13 years in Higher Education at both the state system and university level. Her experience includes ERP process design and support, end-user training and IT functional resource management. She has supported HRIS projects spanning system upgrades to a lead HCM resource on a full implementation of a statewide HR and Payroll solution for over 30,000 workers, involving significant re-alignment of processes and system design across 30+ individual state colleges and universities. She specializes in bringing commonly siloed areas of the campus IT technical, functional, and end-user community together to build system literacy.

Kathryn Mulvey, HCM Practice Lead (kmulvey@collaborativesolutions.com)
Kathryn has 5 years of experience implementing complex Workday projects for Higher Education Institutions, ranging from large Universities Iwith Medical Centers to Community Colleges and Research Institutes. She currently represents Collaborative Solutions as a Workday Product Lead for Education & Government, guiding product development for academic functionality. Prior to implementing Workday, Kathryn worked in Higher Education IT for 20 years as a systems and applications administrator where she deployed and managed enterprise systems and applications at the institution and state system levels. Her wide experience in support of faculty and executive initiatives prompted her to lead the Workday team as part of a statewide, nine-institution Workday implementation for HCM, Finance, and Payroll.

Bryan Birkeness, Financials Practice Lead (bbirkeness@collaborativesolutions.com)
Bryan has over 7 years of experience in Workday Financials consulting with the majority of his experience within Higher Education. Bryan has implemented Workday as a functional lead and functional architect on over 13 full lifecycle implementations, 10 of which were Higher Education. Bryan’s experience as a lead is based on implementing all of the different areas in the FIN suite and has been the functional architect on 6 of those projects (3 in Higher Education). Bryan served as a Banking and Settlement Product Lead with Workday for over 2 years and then as an Endowments Product Lead for over 2 years based on the growing need of endowment experience in the Workday ecosystem. Bryan has been a Functional Architect for two R1 Universities’ implementations with direct oversight on all of FINs and as a Strategy Lead for another R1 University. Bryan currently oversees all North American financials projects related to Higher Education and Non-Profit to help drive transformation and optimization for our customers.

Derek Ball, Student Practice Lead (dball@collaborativesolutions.com)
Derek has 17+ years of experience in higher education with 12 years focused on managing all aspects of student financial aid functions. In his most recent role, he was responsible for centralizing the Verification and Return to Title IV processes of 16 colleges in the Kentucky Community and Technical College System (KCTCS) while serving as the primary functional lead for both the PeopleSoft Campus Solutions Financial Aid module and the Regent Education software implementations. As the functional financial aid lead for KCTCS, he provided guidance and regulatory expertise to the colleges in addition to developing solutions, best practices, improving stability and maximizing efficiency in system-wide financial aid processes. He is currently certified in Student Records, Student Financials, Student Financial Aid, Reporting, and Project Management and serving as the functional architect on our current student projects.

Chad Kainz, Higher Education Strategy Advisor (ckainz@collaborativesolutions.com)
With 28+ years of professional experience, Chad specializes in strategy, planning, and transformation in the areas of leadership alignment, service delivery, worker/student experience, and the applied use of technology to transform organizations and organizational culture. Since 2018, Chad has worked within Collaborative’s Strategy & Transformation practice, drawing upon his 18 years at the University of Chicago in IT leadership; 8 years within strategic consulting related to digital/online learning, student experience, and learning technology; and 2+ years as a co-PI and co-director of a Mellon-funded shared services planning project with UC Berkeley. He has contributed to research projects funded by Mellon, IBM and the National Library of Medicine, and joint efforts of the IEEE, Ivy Plus, Big-10, CNI, CSG, NITLE, EDUCAUSE, and Internet2.