Top 6 Tips for Going Live with Workday
Your Complete Guide to a Successful Workday Launch
The night before our first Workday go-live at Slack, I couldn't sleep.
We'd spent 9 months preparing. Tested everything twice. Trained 600+ employees. But lying awake at 2 AM, all I could think about was everything that could go wrong.
What if payroll fails? What if managers can't approve time off? What if the data migration corrupted something critical?
That go-live went smoothly—not because we were lucky, but because we followed a specific set of principles I'd learned the hard way from previous implementations.
After supporting 40+ Workday implementations (from both the consulting and client side at companies like Google, Slack, and Coinbase), I've distilled these lessons into 6 essential tips that separate chaotic launches from smooth ones.
Whether you're weeks away from go-live or just starting your implementation journey, these tips will help you avoid the mistakes I've seen derail too many Workday launches.
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Book a Meeting with an ExpertThe 6 Essential Tips for Workday Go-Live Success
Here's what we'll cover:
1. Aligning to the Company's Executive Strategy
2. Determining the Workday Team Support Model
3. Maintaining Strong Workday Governance & Organizational Engagement
4. Adopting an Agile Methodology
5. Focusing on People, Process, then Systems (in that order)
6. Identifying and Closing the Skills Gap
Let's dive in.
Tip #1: Align to the Company's Executive Strategy
A company's Corporate and People Strategy are the backbone to true HR transformation.
By understanding the direction of the company, each business unit executive can align to that and create a cascading effect from their leadership teams, all the way to their first-line managers and individual contributors.
The lack of a "north star" often leads to a lot of churn, creating a constant need to put out fires and fill communication gaps, rather than being able to focus on strategic growth for your teams.
Real-World Example
At Coinbase, aligning our Workday configuration to the company's hypergrowth strategy meant building for scale from day one. We knew the company would double (or triple) in size within 18 months, so every configuration decision was evaluated against the question: "Will this still work at 3x our current headcount?"
This strategic alignment prevented countless rework later and ensured our Workday platform could grow with the business.
Questions to Assess Your Strategic Alignment
Here's a short list of questions to determine if you're on the right track:
• Recruiting & Performance Philosophy: Are your recruiting and performance philosophies closely aligned with your company values? Why or why not?
• CFO Partnership: How does HR support the CFO with hitting financial targets? How can you leverage Workday to support those goals?
• Feedback Culture: What is the company philosophy around real-time feedback versus running an annual/bi-annual performance cycle?
• Employee Development: What is the framework that supports employee engagement, learning, and development? What is your attract, retain, and engage philosophy?
If you can't answer these questions clearly, pause your implementation timeline and get alignment first. Workday configuration decisions made without strategic clarity become expensive to undo later.
For more on this, read our guide on avoiding the 5 common implementation mistakes that often stem from poor CFO alignment.
Tip #2: Determine Your Workday Team Support Model
Whether you are currently implementing Workday, already live, or just thinking about purchasing Workday in the near future, it's never too early to think about your Workday Team Support Model.
Consider the business reasons you decided to move to Workday, beyond just the fact that your prior HRIS could not scale. Workday is a powerful system that can transform the way people work within your organization. You'll want to ensure you have the right structure in place to support your business stakeholders on day one.
The Four Workday Support Models
1. Centralized Model
Central IT and functional (HR/Finance) alignment.
Key Features:
• Consolidated, dedicated team
• Shared adoption blueprint
• Areas of specialization
Best For: Small-to-mid sized companies (100-30,000 employees).
2. Decentralized Model
Distributed team alignment to functions (Finance/HR), business units, or organizational units.
Key Features:
• Smaller core team with other resources decentralized
• Each area may own plan, design, and execution
• Specialists in designated area
Best For: Mid-to-large global enterprises (30,000-100,000 employees).
3. Shared Services Model
Tiered model leveraging shared services infrastructure.
Key Features:
• Tiered delivery model
• Efficiency at scale
• Defined service-level agreements (SLAs)
Best For: Very large global enterprises (100,000+ employees).
4. Outsourced Capacity Model
Team utilizing staff augmentation, selective sourcing, or application managed services.
Key Features:
• Offered by Workday professional service firms
• Ongoing management and support
• Staff is Workday trained and/or certified
Best For: Most Workday customers utilize some blend of outsourced capacity, regardless of their primary support model.
How to Choose Your Support Model
Quick Decision Framework:
• Under 10,000 employees? Start with Centralized
• 10,000-50,000 employees? Consider Centralized + Outsourced Capacity
• 50,000+ employees? Evaluate Decentralized or Shared Services + Outsourced Capacity
For more on building your support team, check out our position management best practices to ensure you're structuring roles correctly from day one.
Not sure which support model is right for you?
Book a free strategy call with Seena to discuss your specific situation and get personalized recommendations.
Book a free strategy call with an ExpertTip #3: Maintain Strong Workday Governance & Organizational Engagement
Workday Governance, coupled with your Workday support team, is a key factor in helping drive the success of your implementation, as well as ongoing platform health and stabilization.
The right Workday Governance defines how Workday will fit into your overall organization strategy, from a philosophical and tactical perspective. It provides a forum for team leads and leadership to be informed and provide strategic guidance and oversight when needed. It's also an opportunity for the Workday Support team to pitch project ideas and influence leadership on a direction for the Workday roadmap.
The Three Pillars of Workday Governance
1. Strategic (Executive Committee)
These are your C-Level executives and project sponsors. Some members prefer to just be in the loop, while others have valuable, active input into the work planned in upcoming quarters.
Meeting Cadence: Quarterly (or as needed for major decisions)
2. Tactical (Leadership Team)
This includes leadership in HR/IT/Finance, key business line leaders, and a representative voice of your end user.
Meeting Cadence: Monthly
3. Operational (Working Team)
Your Workday analysts for functional, technical, change management, and special projects.
Meeting Cadence: Weekly
Building Strategic Partnerships
As part of your Workday governance strategy, drive strategic partnerships between your Workday Support team and various stakeholders across your business (People Partners, Total Rewards, Payroll, Finance, Accounting, etc.).
Establishing these connections and cultivating the relationships between them will help the Workday Support team understand how to best serve the business, as well as prioritize requests across the organization so you can focus on the high-impact changes.
In our Lightspeed case study, strong governance was one of the key factors that enabled them to achieve a 73% reduction in position data errors within 60 days. Without executive alignment and clear decision-making authority, that transformation would have taken much longer.
Tip #4: Adopt an Agile Methodology
If you think about the Plan → Build → Run model in an Agile framework, you will want to balance the skills and capabilities of your Workday Support Team to support each of these verticals.
Plan Phase
This is your strategic lens into the business in building your HR/Finance capabilities within Workday. Depending on the support model that you've selected, this resource will likely be a Product Manager or a Sr. Manager to Director-level of HR or Financial Applications.
Key Responsibilities:
• Maintain an 18-24 month Workday roadmap
• Deep understanding of Workday capabilities
• Strong relationships with business and operations teams
Build Phase
These are your large project initiatives. If you're implementing Workday for the first time, you're likely utilizing professional services. You may continue using professional services for adopting additional modules, or you can opt to take these on internally if you have the right skills.
Build Phase Considerations:
• New module implementations
• Major integrations (like Workday-Greenhouse integration)
• Significant process redesigns
For help with your Build phase, learn about our Implementation Services.
Run Phase
This includes production support, bug fixes, enhancements, Workday update adoption, and small-to-medium projects. Depending on the size of your internal team, the skill set amongst them, and your Workday footprint, a lot of this work can be handled internally.
Run Phase Best Practice: Build internal capability over time. Companies that rely entirely on external consultants for Run activities often end up in a cycle of dependency that becomes increasingly expensive.
Need help building your Workday roadmap?
Learn about Kandor Kickstart, our 4-week pre-implementation program designed to set you up for success.
Book a free Strategy call with an ExpertTip #5: Focus on People, Process, then Systems—In That Order
A common misconception that many Workday customers face is the thought that purchasing Workday as their HRIS platform will solve issues related to people, data, and process.
This thought process will always backfire.
Workday is intended to enable your business to transform their HR automation, workflows, and much more. But you must first hire the right people, then ensure you have the right processes setup to scale your business, and only then will you be armed with the right tools to build a world-class Workday platform.
According to Gartner, 55% of HR leaders report their technology doesn't meet business needs—usually because they focused on systems before people and process.
The Right Order of Priority
1. People First
Ensure you have the right people, in the right roles. This is critical. People are the core to any organization. Without the right talent, it does not matter what processes and systems you have in place since you will not have the right people building and running that framework for your organization.
2. Process Second
Does your organization have the right processes in place to enable your People to support leveraging the power of Workday? Many organizations try to rely on Workday to fix their People and Process issues. This does not work. Align your processes with your company's strategy, with scale in mind.
3. Systems Third
Workday is the best in brand when it comes to HR and Financial Management SaaS applications. From a capabilities perspective, they have it all. But the most beautiful Workday configuration in the world won't help if your people and processes aren't ready to use it effectively.
If you're struggling with this prioritization, our blog on 5 common Workday implementation mistakes covers how this principle applies to specific implementation challenges.
Tip #6: Identify and Close the Skills Gap
Your Workday Support Team will be as effective as the team members on that team. You will want to bring on the right skillset (and culture fit!) to ensure you are able to support the capabilities that you have gone live with in Workday.
Match Skills to Your Modules
For example, if you've gone live with Core HCM, Talent Management, and Absence Management, make sure that your first hire has a background in those Workday capabilities. It won't help you to hire someone who knows the Learning and Recruiting modules since you are not using those capabilities.
Consider also the additional platform modules that you will want to implement in future phases. If you know that you want to implement Payroll in the near future, bring on a Payroll, Absence, Time Tracking (PATT) resource that can help support the implementation.
Skills Gap Assessment Questions
Ask yourself:
• Do we have internal expertise for every Workday module we've implemented?
• Who will own Workday updates and testing cycles?
• Do we have integration expertise, or are we dependent on external consultants?
• What happens when our primary Workday person takes PTO?
For more on avoiding common position management pitfalls when structuring your Workday team, see our guide on 5 common position management mistakes.
Real-World Cost Savings
Example 1: Payroll Implementation
A technology company in the Bay Area was looking to implement Payroll and Time Tracking after already going live with Workday the year before. They received a professional services quote of approximately $200,000. Later they decided to hire internally for that role and implemented those modules in-house with minimal professional services support, saving the company over $180,000 in two quarters.
Example 2: Integration Support
An Oil and Gas Company in Texas spent north of $200,000 to build and repair many integrations within a single quarter. When they decided to hire a full-time internal resource to own and manage their Workday integrations internally, they were able to reduce their professional services spend by over 85%.
These examples demonstrate why building internal capability is so important. For more cost-saving strategies, read our guide on how to save big on your Workday deployment.
Struggling to find the right Workday talent?
Contact our team to discuss meeting with our top 1% talent — we bring best-in-class Workday professionals to the team so you can expect the A-Team.
Book a free strategy call with an ExpertThe Bottom Line
Option 1: Assess Your Implementation Risks
Take our free Implementation Risk Assessment to identify which of the 5 most common implementation mistakes threaten your rollout. You'll get a personalized action plan based on your scores.
Option 2: Talk to Someone Who's Been There
Book a free strategy call with Seena. We'll review your specific situation and create a clear action plan—no sales pitch, just honest guidance from someone who's supported 40+ Workday implementations from both sides of the table.
Option 3: Keep Learning
• The Ultimate Guide to Workday Implementation
• 10-Step Implementation Checklist
• 5 Common Implementation Mistakes
Related Resources
Case Studies
• Lightspeed Launch Deployment - 73% error reduction, 30-day turnaround
Services
• Kinnect - Headcount management software
• Advisory Services - Solution architecture
About the Author
Seena Mojahedi is the CEO and Founder of Kandor Solutions. After working on the consulting side at DayNine Consulting, he spent six years at prestigious technology companies such as Google, Slack, and Coinbase managing Workday implementations from the client side.
He's been in the trenches on over 40 implementations and has seen what works (and what doesn't) when organizations try to implement and maintain Workday.
Why Seena started Kandor Solutions: He's passionate about helping Workday customers own their platforms—not just use them. Traditional consulting creates dependency. Kandor builds capability.
When he's not working, he loves spending time with his family, traveling, snowboarding, hiking, and enjoying his morning cappuccino.
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