Completing Workday implementation tasks can feel a bit overwhelming for underprepared and misguided teams…
Read on to learn how help from a Workday implementation consultant can help and how Surety Systems can provide the right consultant for your needs — the first time.
What is Workday Implementation?
Workday implementation involves planning, designing, developing, testing, and deploying Workday modules and applications throughout an organization to meet specific needs.
Here are a few key steps in preparing your organization for Workday implementation:
- Evaluate current practices: Understanding your organization’s needs and finding ways to maximize the efficiency of your internal processes is crucial in not only helping your team configure Workday solutions accordingly, but also in maximizing your Workday investment. Workday’s default settings for each application may not meet the needs of your team, so it’s important to consider the best ways to configure the system to meet each of your specific needs.
- Plan, plan, plan: This step not only involves planning the implementation itself, but also ensuring the framework and capabilities of your new Workday system will be able to meet your organizational needs in the long run and be able to adapt and grow as your priorities and business needs evolve over time. In planning your Workday implementation, it’s important to consider the immediate and long term effects that will lead to success to and through your Go-Live date.
- Establish your internal implementation team: When planning your internal implementation team, understanding which employees are the best fit for the job and carefully defining project goals and team member expectations is crucial to your success. You need to outline which members of the team will act as functional and technical leaders, as well as promoting collaboration between teams by sharing the vision, timeline, and key objectives for Workday development and implementation.
- Assess current data inventory: Data is one of the most valuable assets to an organization, so ensuring your data is cleaned and managed properly is extremely important. From determining which data will be imported into your new Workday system to cleaning your data to ensure the highest quality possible and consolidating it across multiple disparate systems, data is a continual (and very important) aspect of finding success in your implementation process.
- Consolidate key processes: Before you deploy your new Workday technology, take the time to consider a few key areas of improvement and ways to enhance consistency among workflows. By taking a closer look into the ways your key business processes can be combined, consolidated, and optimized, your organization will be better able to adapt to keep up with the latest technology.
- Outline change management plans: Change management is a key contributing factor in the long term success of any organization. And, proactively outlining a change management plan will not only contribute to more cohesive processes, but it will also maintain and improve employee engagement throughout the full implementation timeline.
- Champion the benefits: Understanding the importance and value of a new system like Workday is an important step in helping to facilitate interaction with key functional areas of each application or tool. It is essential to your post Go-Live success to find employees, managers, and system administrators that recognize the benefits of Workday and will help champion the Workday technology throughout the organization.
Things to Consider When Deploying Workday
- Ensure proper time and budget resources: Timeline and budget are a few of the first things to consider when beginning your Workday implementation journey. On one hand, planning a project budget ensures that your team has the right resources to handle each implementation phase in a way that optimizes process efficiency. On the other, understanding the amount of time each phase will take is crucial in making sure your timeline matches your budget and avoiding any harmful timing drawbacks.
- Plan for data migration: Gaining access to essential data, identifying gaps in your workflow, and mapping data migration routes across systems is a crucial step in a successful Workday deployment. This consideration involves finding ways to automate manual data processing and migration tasks and checking data for errors or duplication before migration begins.
- Define workflow processes: Having a plan for workflow automation is one thing, but one that key departments and stakeholders throughout the organization agree upon is a whole other story. This is where proactive workflow process definition and creation comes in. By identifying current areas of weakness and outlining a defined plan to fix them, workflows can be created and maintained more easily, leading to more cohesive practices and more satisfied employees.
- Stay away from unnecessary customization: Customization can benefit organizations by creating a more hands-on, personalized solution, but with too many custom features, pages, and processes comes a long list of updates, upgrades, and quite a few extra headaches. Instead of customizing every aspect of your Workday system, focus on customizing high-priority processes and matching your processes to the technology to save yourself valuable time and money in the long run.
- Focus on testing: Testing is an important resource throughout your Workday deployment processes as it helps analyze implementation tactics and outline leading practices for a successful software lifecycle both during implementation and beyond. It’s also recommended to involve key personnel in different departments and areas of the business, including human resources managers and business analysts, to ensure everyone is on the same page as you approach your Go-Live date.
Where Does a Workday Consultant Come In?
Our Workday consultants are here for their clients no matter what. They provide comprehensive subject matter knowledge and consulting expertise that goes beyond the skills and capabilities of traditional Workday partner firms.
Here are a few of the key ways our Workday consultants can help:
Project Management
Workday implementations require specific expertise, skills, and leadership from the project management team.
Having someone on your side who has not only been through the implementation process before, but who can also provide personalized insight to help explain methodology, maintain important checkpoints, and track phase progress is essential to your success. Luckily for you, this is where our Workday project management consultants come in.
Support for Testing
Because testing is such an important aspect in preparing teams for implementation, it’s crucial to have someone who understands what to test and how to test. This will not only save your organization valuable time and money, but it will also help prepare your teams for life after the consultant leaves.
Our consultants understand what kinds of cases to test within your Workday system, as well as the best possible testing methods for your specific team.
Preparation for Life After Go-Live
From training on enterprise interface builders (EIBs) to transaction support, system maintenance tips, and more, our client-side consultants can help train your employees to handle the system once it goes live. This way, companies feel more prepared for life after Go-Live.
Our Workday Consulting Services
Surety Systems is not a run-of-the-mill Workday service partner, and we do not operate like traditional Workday consulting firms. Our team of senior-level consultants has extensive consulting experience and is hand-picked to meet your individual needs.
Your company. Your needs. Our expertise. That’s the name of the game with our team.
And, to give you a better idea of what to expect from our Workday consulting services, we’ve included a snapshot of one of our top-notch consultants:
Surety Senior Workday Implementation Consultant
- 8+ years of Workday implementation experience
- Workday certified in HCM, Recruiting, Talent and Performance, and Learning
- Has previously worked at two different partners as an Implementation Consultant and then transitioned to client-side work
- Expert with the implementation of Core HCM and Recruiting including business processes and security
- Experience supporting report creation, business process configuration, unit and smoke testing, conditional logic, and calculated fields
Interested in learning more about the ways our Workday Project Managers can help your implementation run smoothly? Click here.
Contact us today to learn more about our Workday consulting services or get started on a project.
