This article provides insights from a recent Workday end client on their successful implementation project, offering valuable takeaways to help organizations overcome common hurdles, engage key stakeholders, and achieve their implementation goals. We sat down with a Workday end client who recently went through a Workday implementation and a client who is currently considering the switch to Workday, facilitating conversation and gathering valuable insight to help other organizations moving to Workday ensure a successful implementation.
From effective change management to legacy system backfill, data management, and thorough testing, these key takeaways and lessons learned provide a roadmap for ensuring a seamless and successful migration to Workday.
A Closer Look at Previous Experience
One of our public sector clients recently underwent a migration to a new Workday system, implementing core Workday Human Capital Management, Recruiting, Benefits, Payroll, Absence, and Time Tracking applications in their existing technical infrastructure.
The client partnered with a large Workday implementation partner, offering support throughout key project phases, including planning, configuration, testing, and deployment to ensure alignment with timelines and goals. However, the client recognized that implementation partners don’t always have the right tools and bandwidth to adequately support all their needs at one time.
One of the biggest pain points related to critical data conversion and management efforts is ensuring the overall strength and bandwidth of the client’s internal team. Additionally, implementation partners typically provide basic ETL and data transformation tools, so if a client’s implementation involves a major redesign, changes in accounting structure, or modifications to the organizational hierarchy, they will need to spend more time transforming their legacy data to the correct format for their new Workday system. As the entire responsibility of key data extraction processes lies on the client’s shoulders, they require advanced technical expertise, either through internal employees or external consulting partners.
“I would encourage all project managers to set expectations with their staff to help with some of the configuration tasks. This helps them better understand where the data is coming from, where it’s going, how it’s getting there, and how to resolve any problems after you go live.” – Technical PM, Surety Systems
While the client had adequate technical knowledge from their internal IT teams for tasks like SQL and Python scripting and external support from their established Workday implementation partner, they required tailored consulting resources to help them facilitate effective data extraction, migration, and management from their legacy system to the new Workday system. They brought in external support detached from the system implementer to handle core implementation tasks and ensure internal employees understood how to navigate, support, and optimize their system once it went live.
Our Workday consulting team provided additional support to help the client fill in the gaps left by the system implementer, including critical data extraction, conversion, configuration, and training tasks. They augmented the client’s internal team to streamline data conversion between their legacy system and their new Workday system, facilitate effective migration through EIB and iLoad capabilities, and conduct thorough system testing to ensure proper functionality.
Key Takeaways
This section delves into the key takeaways from a recent Workday implementation project, highlighting the challenges faced, the strategies employed, and the outcomes achieved.
From aligning stakeholders and completing thorough system testing to facilitating effective data extraction and leveraging change management effectively, these insights from our Workday end-client provide actionable insights for other organizations planning their own Workday journey.
Project leaders
“I started with the client as a Project Manager, but as we were going through each phase, it became clear that we needed a Product Manager over the Workday product. With two releases per year, open enrollment periods, end-of-year close requirements, and any break-fixes for additional features, they needed someone who was focused mainly on the product itself. We ended up creating a Technical Program Manager role, which is where I currently sit today.” – Workday Program Manager
While Workday implementation projects do require a knowledgeable Project Manager, either from the existing internal staff or an external consulting firm, like Surety Systems, oftentimes, clients lack adequate support for their actual Workday products, not just the tasks and processes associated with them.
On one hand, a Workday Project Manager is integral in ensuring roles and responsibilities for each employee are well defined, keeping project phases on time and within budget, and understanding how new Workday applications and features work to accomplish tasks or maintain key business processes.
On the other, a Workday Program Manager bears the responsibility of owning and managing the entire Workday product, including keeping track of releases, understanding which areas of the system are being enhanced, navigating tenant administration tasks, and ensuring the right people are working in the right areas of the system.
External support
For organizations like this end client, with adequate internal resources and staff to handle critical project objectives and a limited budget, it is recommended to bring in additional external support for the testing phase, at a minimum. With extra hands on deck, your team can conduct more thorough and comprehensive testing, ensuring that every scenario, functionality, and integration point is properly vetted and reducing the likelihood of post-go-live issues.
While the team working on the recent Workday implementation discovered that external support from the beginning of the project would have been beneficial to enhance conversion, reporting, and integration efficiency, if the budget only allows for one area of support, testing is recommended.
Data extraction and conversion
The client’s implementation partner used both EIBs and iLoads to migrate data configuration and conversion from tenant to tenant, build initial tenants, and verify that data was loaded into the new Workday system correctly. They did this by loading information directly from employee profiles and building out reports for key data points, validating the data extracted from their legacy system, and properly converting it into Workday.
Organizations must decide whether they have the right technical knowledge on their internal teams to support key data conversion, migration, and management tasks or need additional support through an SI or external consulting team. This ensures that data from their legacy systems is properly migrated into Workday, maintaining data consistency and integrity across their entire technical infrastructure.
Complex reporting
Workday provides many different types of reports and reporting functionality, including simple, advanced, matrix, and composite reports and Prism Analytics or Workday Studio functions. Depending on the complexity and nature of their legacy system, organizations must look at composite reports and matrices to support different suites of their new Workday system and understand how their data moves both within and across their systems.
“We need to ask ourselves, ‘Are we going to put a bigger investment in Workday Studio or do we use external consultants to cover that work?’ and realize the kind of support we need to cover reporting before we hit the Go-Live point.” – Workday Program Manager
It’s also important to consider how your internal resources are involved with key reporting tasks. For example, if there is an individual in a specific department that works heavily with reporting, such as ACA or FSA reports, they should be involved in building and executing some of these reports rather than relying on the implementor to deliver all of them. This way, internal employees are aware of the end-to-end reporting process, leading to a smoother transition when the implementor moves off the project after Go-Live.
Thorough testing
This client leveraged two different types of testing required to ensure proper system functionality: individual component (or unit) testing and end-to-end testing. Unit testing involves the initial testing of each component of the product area to ensure proper functionality, whereas end-to-end testing combines each of the units to analyze the entire operational process.
“End-to-end testing is the phase where you go ‘I thought this was going to work this way, but it’s actually working this way. Is it acceptable? If not, how do we correct that?’.” – Technical PM, Surety Systems
With the addition of external testing support for both the initial and end-to-end testing phases, organizations can answer key questions about system design and functionality and have tangible knowledge of the new Workday products throughout the entire design, development, and deployment process.
User training
Training within the client’s new Workday landscape was very configuration, integration, and conversion-based, but the training package from their chosen implementation partner did not provide the proper configuration support they needed. The client realized that a successful Go-Live requires more training support to maintain sustainable operations and support critical objectives within and across the new Workday landscape.’
“A lot of the up-front training is very configuration heavy, and oftentimes you’re not sitting side by side doing the configuration with the implementor. That leads to a lot of wasted dollars on training. I would advise most teams to wait until just before testing to do that training since it is so configuration-based.” – Workday Program Manager
By conducting personalized training based on individual roles, permissions, and requirements, your organization can ensure internal employees have the knowledge and support they need to complete tasks, manage data, and adequately handle their new Workday system.
Get Started with Workday Consultants
Whether you need additional support navigating complex data conversion and configuration objectives, streamlining testing and training efforts, or keeping internal teams on the same page throughout the entire project lifecycle, our team at Surety Systems can help.
Contact us today to learn more about our Workday consulting services and how our consultants can augment your internal team to achieve key project goals.
