Picture this: your Workday go-live date suddenly seems too close for comfort as numerous challenges are threatening to derail your implementation. Completeness and accuracy of the data for your go-live tenant cannot be verified, it is not clear who will maintain integrations, and reports that were supposed to be approved by now have not even been developed. On top of it all, your implementation team is burned out.
This scenario, unfortunately, becomes a reality for many Workday HCM and Finance implementation customers. Does this sound familiar to you? Don’t worry! I’ll explain what are the typical cases, and how to handle such scenarios.
During cut-over and go-live days, there are many things to prioritize and your team is usually quite new to handle the way Workday HCM implementation cycle works.
Below I have listed five examples of topics which should be addressed after go-live.
As we all know, backbone of Workday is business processes, and sanity of these business processes ensures smooth functioning of the system. One example of a common problem scenario is when the business process steps and conditions, which you have tested throughly during testing phase, bring unpredicted scenarios when working with different countries, different business units, or different users after go-live.
Another problem might emerge when you try to remove or add a few of the step conditions, validations, help texts etc. There can also be some extra notifications, which are now bothering managers or HR team.
It is important to regularly allocate people to streamline your processes and ensure that your system configuration fits the best to your current business needs.
Security is also one of the most important factors and no matter how prepared you think you are, you will still find discrepancies. Fixing them will allow you to substantially improve your Cloud HCM solution.
It is not unusual that customers who have been live with Workday for a while have too complex security structure, which does not fit their current business needs. And that is why Security always need to be throughly reviewed.
You can get a professional analysis of the security model. As a result you will receive suggestions on how the security model could be improved to work more efficiently and effectively.
There can be a few integrations and custom reports which were not considered in scope during the initial project, but now after the go-live you might feel the need. During cut-over and later in hypercare stage, getting quality data in place and loading it to the system is really a critical factor.
Prioritize the needs and seek for extra hands, if you can not get this all in place by yourself.
During some implementation projects, the solution is built and tested on the current-at-the-time Workday version, but as soon as you go live, you get a new version in. In this scenario, the latest Workday features are often not sufficiently utilised. Which results in the situation when you may not be yielding the highest return of investments in this technology.
To get a maximum advantage of your new tool you need experts to review and apply the latest features. The need might come with every new Workday release and that should be taken into consideration whenever you create resourcing plans.
Last but not least, end user experience and employee engagement is always one of the important factors of a successful project. Identifying training needs in specific user groups is the key to user adoption. Extra help might come handy to identify and coordinate training paths within your company.
Do you need help to ensure your Workday develops together with your business needs?
It is irrevocable that successful Workday deployment and post go-live life is all about team work, co-operation between us – consultants and you – the customer side stakeholders: project manager, stream leads, HR process owners, integration owners/leads, project members, testers and third-party project providers, and integration system vendors. I always enjoyed working with you all and I hope you feel the same.
Did you recognise your case in my story or do you need help with other Cloud HCM related topic? Me and my colleagues at TietoEVRY are available at your service. Check this link for more information.