Prior to joining Collaborative Solutions, I worked as a Senior HRIS Analyst for a customer who embarked on a Workday implementation. With experience now from both sides, it’s easy to point out Workday implementation steps that have streamlined the process greatly.
Steps To A Better Workday Implementation Process
If I could do it all over again, here are the things I’d do to improve the Workday implementation process:
1. Get the right people involved
There’s more to Workday than just helping HR and Financials folks do their jobs. The reality is that Workday will be utilized by and will interact with many functional areas within your organization, so don’t leave those people or departments out. The input of those who use the data downstream will be just as important as those who do the day-to-day tasks in Workday. To achieve a seamless implementation, each person should be assigned a role on the project team (dedicated project team member, subject matter expert, stakeholder, etc.) and expectations on how much participation is needed to ensure a successful implementation should be established from the beginning. This will allow team members to be available when needed and ensure deadlines aren’t delayed. Getting everyone involved from the beginning will enable the team to make the right decisions up front and reduce the amount of time reworking the system to fit the needs of every part of the organization.2. Know your data
We’ve all heard the phrase “garbage in garbage out,” right? This line of thinking is definitely true for a Workday implementation. The system will only be as good as the data that is stored in it, so it’s important to know your company’s data in order to make decisions on how best to utilize Workday. Think about the data in terms of the fields it will be housed in, the business processes it will be a part of, the third party systems that will use it, and the reporting needs of the organization. Take the time to clean the data in the legacy system prior to loading it into Workday. Not only will this make the data load process smoother, it will save time by reducing errors or re-work in Workday.
3. Understand your existing and desired business processes
Workday is like Wall-E: it’s a process-driven system. Do the research prior to implementation to understand and document your current processes—noting their successes and their challenges—and to identify additional processes that are needed. This information will then easily transfer into Workday’s business process framework.
4. Identify the systems Workday will talk to
Workday is not an island. It will feed data to multiple internal and/or third party systems and could have data fed back into it as well. It is critical to know all the data touch points and system exchanges that are required up front in order to avoid surprises during the project. Integrations require technical knowledge as well as time to build and test. Adding additional integrations in the middle of the implementation could have serious impacts to the project timelines and the budget. Make sure to also consider any other system implementations planned for the organization and what their impact may be to the Workday implementation steps.
5. Keep a decision log
Over the course of the implementation, hundreds -- if not thousands --of decisions will be made. Some of the decisions may be small and others will have major impacts on the operations. Keeping a log of all the decisions as they are made will help the team remember not only the decisions themselves but also the reasons why they were made weeks or even months later. This log can also be used to bring a new person up to speed on the project, provide justification to stakeholders, and assist in training.
6. Own the Testing Process
Testing is one of the most important phases of any Workday implementation. It will be the first opportunity many users will have to get their hands on the new Workday system and see what it can do for them. Testing should involve more than just the core project team members; thus allowing the core team to learn how to support the system as a part of the knowledge transfer process. (Remember, although your Collaborative consultants will be there to support you during testing, the ultimate goal is for your core team to support your Workday system post go-live without the help of external Workday implementation consultants). Testers will be able to get comfortable in the system under safe conditions, take ownership in the system as they become part of the process, and increase acceptance by helping others during go-live. Also, the test scenarios you create can be utilized train new users in the future and the test plan can be reused to test the updates from Workday with each release.
7. Keep Your Eye on the Prize
When the project kicks off, your end users are eager to get started because they have been anticipating the benefits this new tool will have on their day-to-day activities. Each stage of the project has its own tasks and to-do’s which might leave your team feeling “in the weeds”. Don’t lose sight of the big picture – make sure you have a clear understanding of what implementing Workday will do for the business so you can measure against it.
8. Celebrate Milestones
Party! The project team will inevitably be working to their limits to help make the Workday implementation steps successful. Over the course of the project there will be successes and challenges, strengths and weaknesses, efforts to balance different personalities, and much more. Taking a minute to celebrate milestones and show the team how much the organization appreciates their work will go a long way to keeping morale up and motivating everyone to push through to a successful go-live. Then the real celebration begins!
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