Top 6 Tips for Going Live with Workday
Sourced from Workday Community
by Seena Mojahedi | August 18, 2020
Congratulations! If you’re reading this, you’ve either started embarking on your Workday® journey or you’re getting close to launching Workday.
A Workday Phase 1 implementation is always challenging, and also very rewarding.
You have an opportunity to truly transform HR through Workday. And once you are live, you have a long, fun road ahead. Outside of ensuring you have a quality initial Workday rollout, there are many things to consider as you’re going live with Workday.
We’ve consolidated our years of experience to share our Top 6 Tips for Going Live with Workday.
1. Aligning to the Company’s Executive Strategy
2. Determining the Workday Team Support Model
3. Maintain strong Workday Governance & Organizational Engagement
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1. Aligning 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.
Here is a short list some example questions that you can think through to determine if you’re on the right track:
Are your recruiting and performance philosophies closely aligned with your company values? Why or why not?
How does HR support the CFO with hitting financial targets? How can we leverage Workday to support those goals?
What is the company philosophy around real-time feedback versus running an annual / bi-annual performance cycle?
What is the framework that is used to support employee engagement, learning, and development? What is your attract, retain, and engage philosophy?
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2. Determining the 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 the 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 very powerful system that can transform the way people work within your organization. And as such, you will certainly want to ensure that you have the right structure in place so you are able to support your business stakeholders on day one.
There are four types of Workday Support Models to consider, each with their own set of pros and cons:
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Centralized:
Central IT and functional (HR/Finance) Alignment
Key Features:
Consolidated, dedicated team
Shared adoption blueprint
Areas of specialization
Some examples of companies that would use a centralized Workday Support Model are small-to-mid sized companies between 100-30,000 employees. Larger corporations are more nuanced with added complexity for global processes, legal and compliance considerations, and organization-specific configuration.
Decentralized:
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
Some examples of companies that would use a decentralized Workday Support Model are mid-to-large global enterprises between 30,000-100,000 employees. Larger corporations are more nuanced with added complexity for global processes, legal and compliance considerations, and organization-specific configuration.
Shared Services:
Tiered model leveraging shared services infrastructure
Key Features:
Tiered delivery model
Efficiency at scale
Defined service-level agreements (SLAs)
Companies that generally use the Shared Services Workday Support Model are very large global enterprises with over 100,000+ employees. These firms may have a call center setup as Tier 1 Support, Regional HR Operations owning Tier 2 Support, and a Regional Workday Support Team as Tier 3 Workday Support for enhancement and bug fixes to the platform.
Outsourced Capacity: 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
Most Workday customers utilize some blend of outsourced capacity, regardless of whether or not they are using one of the other Workday Support Models. Depending on the leadership philosophy of the business unit that owns Workday Support, some strive to always leave room in the budget for outsourced capacity, while others strive to build all the Workday subject matter expertise in house.
The examples above are not intended to be prescriptive or generalizing in any way. Rather, they are the best practice based on companies’ workforce count and their Workday footprint. There is not a one-size-fits-all, and most firms use a hybrid of 2 of the 4 Workday Support Models.
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.
An example of a Workday Governance can include 3 pillars:
Strategic
Tactical
Operational
Strategic governance will be your executive committee; these are your C-Level suites 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.
The Tactical Team will be the leadership in HR/IT/Finance, key business line leaders, and a representative voice of your end user.
The Operational Team are your Workday analysts for functional, technical, change management, and special projects.
As part of your Workday governance strategy, drive strategic partnerships between your Workday Support team and various stakeholders across your business (e.g. 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.
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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: This is your strategic lens into the business in building our 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. They will always have an 18-24 Workday roadmap, have a deep understanding of Workday capabilities, and strong relationships with the business and operations teams in the company.
Build: These are your large project initiatives. If you’re just implementing Workday for the first time, you’re likely utilizing professional services. Potentially, you will continue using professional services for adopting additional modules in Workday, and you can also opt to take these on internally if you have the right skills internally. Most Workday clients rely on outside support for large projects, and utilize an internal product / project manager to manage the project and vendor resources.
Run: 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. If your Workday team is running lean and there is minimal budget for additional headcount, you can always utilize professional services to augment your RUN support.
Agile Development (Plan-Build-Run)
Created by Kandor Solutions
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. They must first hire the right people, then ensure they have the right processes setup to scale their business, and only then will they be armed with the right tools to build a world-class Workday platform that truly transforms the way they do business.
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.
Process. 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.
Systems. Workday, Workday, Workday! It’s no secret that they are the best in brand when it comes to HR and Financial Management SaaS applications. From a capabilities perspective, they have it all. If you are an organization that is live on Workday or are considering purchasing Workday, it’s very important that you have an understanding of which modules you will be implementing so that you can identify the skills required to hire your world-class Workday team.
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6. Identifying 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.
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.
For example, 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.
Another example is integration support for an Oil and Gas Company in Texas. They spent north of $200,000 to build and repair many integrations within a single quarter. Ultimately, 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%.
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At Kandor Solutions, our philosophy aligns very closely with Workday’s Customer Success team. In fact, we created Kandor because we’re passionate about clients owning and maintaining their Workday platform, and enabling their teams to build world-class HRIS configurations.
We do this by sourcing the best Workday resources globally, and the team that is vetting this talent are actual Workday consultants that have been in the trenches, implementing Workday on the consulting and client side, since Workday first became a company. This service simply does not exist in the Workday ecosystem, as you do not see Workday professionals in Recruiter roles.
Our goal is to ensure that Workday clients are set up for success. We’ve created a staffing vertical to help to find the best Workday talent out there, whether that is for a full-time hire or just on a contract basis. We also have a professional services vertical and can help you with Client-Side PM activities, multi-phased Workday implementations, production support, and more.
About the Author
Seena is the Founder & Owner of Kandor Solutions and has been driving business value for Workday clients and partners for nearly nine years. After working on the consulting side at DayNine Consulting, he spent six years at prestigious technology companies such as Google, Slack, and Coinbase. He has been in the trenches on over 20 client engagements and has a deep understanding of what it takes to plan, build, and run a successful Workday platform.
He started Kandor Solutions because he is passionate about Workday, and is even more passionate about ensuring the Workday ecosystem has top talent to pick from.
When he’s not working, he loves spending time with his family, traveling around the world, snowboarding, hiking, and enjoying his morning cappuccino. He holds a BS in Business Administration with an emphasis in Computer Information Systems from California Polytechnic University, Pomona.