who will you rely on for future Workday expertise and testing capability and what should you expect to need?
So, you have your budget agreed, your mandatory Workday implementation partner has been selected and your in-house IT engineers are ready to work with them. You have your planning milestones in place and a targeted go-live date. You have even carefully considered post-implementation workday support with a go-live remediation plan and hyper-care phase built into your budget and planning. You’re in very good shape to implement.
But what follows? You have choices and it is best to make them now. It may seem a long way off to be worrying about post-implementation workday support but it’s highly likely that you will be facing a new Workday release both during and immediately after hyper-care. There is a risk that your hyper-care phase may run longer than you expect and your workday implementation partner may have moved on. You have likely already considered the need for knowledge transfer and a dedicated in-house support team. There will be ongoing optimization of your configuration and review of your security design, new feature releases to be considered and of course testing, testing, testing.
In-house IT will be equal to this, but only with a commitment to resource the ongoing support requirements with a specialist team. The key difference here is that integrations do require proper engineering support, whereas Workday requires specialist techno-functional support to change the configuration, manage Workday security and test all changes in your sandbox. This is a real knowledge transfer challenge to a dedicated team. It may, or may not, see this as real IT engineering work that belongs in their area. They may, or may not, see this as a headcount that should be on their books.
You need to resolve this now, ahead of starting work on implementation. Headcount and budget will need to be in place, in the right place, with a clear understanding of post-implementation accountabilities.
But there is another route. As your pre-implementation partner rolls-off then maybe a post-implementation partner can step-in with the requisite skills to keep you on track (and without the argument on where the headcount sits!).
Logicacloud’s managed service consultancy in Europe can be your ‘go-to’ provider, one that is experienced in working with your IT engineers and HR professionals to manage those releases, adapt your configuration, test your security and help monitor your integrations.
To be clear, there are a lot of options out there, but your pre-implementation partner is likely to be too expensive, so another option will need to be considered. Knowledge transfer also cannot be avoided. Logicacloud understands these challenges and constraints and offers a ‘Pay as we deliver’ approach to supporting you – there when you need us, for as long as you need us.
What to expect in workday implementation support?
Every organisation is unique in some way. It may be that you have clearly defined policies and HR practices around Compensation, Benefits, Talent Management, Payroll and Absence Management. What comes ‘out of the box’ with Workday is not tailored. Anyone who naively suggests that the organisation should change to adopt ‘out of the box’ processes does not have a good understanding of Workday. Configuration is expected and necessary. Your challenge will be to balance whether to invest in change management requirements versus configuration that is closer to your current practices. Either way, you will need to reengineer your processes to get the full efficiency gains from Workday, but it will be a case of choosing a significant change to how you do things versus configuration to meet your requirements.
You will also have a lot of data that needs to be migrated and not all of it will go into Workday. Historical data will be a challenge that you need to consider early on. Where will it sit, how will it integrate, and where? How and where will analytics be run on datasets in different places?
More importantly, do your policies allow you to use production data in workday implementation support? Confidence in your configuration is much harder to achieve using masked or randomised test data. And how much of a complete data set do you need to be able to sign-off on your configuration? A lot is the answer, if not all. Then you will have the challenge of Security in Workday. Your design may be good, but without your final configuration in place (that relies on good data – ideally production data) your Security set-up cannot be tested. This trinity of data, configuration and security will be your greatest challenge when it comes to testing and testing, testing, testing is a necessary activity before go-live. Figuring out which element is the issue is where expert assistance is needed.
Data, Configuration and Security Risks
Many business people underestimate the volume, sensitivity and complexity of HR data. Added to that we are now in a world of significant GDPR sanctions on data leakage. Your Workday security design is therefore critical, if only to avoid embarrassment to the HR and HRIT functions. More critically, it can be reputationally damaging to your company to have to make a data leakage disclosure to a regulator and accept the investigations and financial sanctions that follow (fines or up to 2% of global turnover!). It is therefore critical that your security should allow employees and managers to only see data that they need to see, to not see data they shouldn’t see, or don’t need to see, and not be able to make changes to data that they should not have access to.
Faced with this trinity of security design, configuration and data integrity that can affect your employees and managers ability to do what they need to do, figuring out the root cause of performance issues is sometimes hard and can have real consequences for business continuity.
When you are faced with an issue whilst in production, the options of taking your system down or limiting security access for users can create a lot of noise, or potentially impact your ability to do business. Revenue loss because of HR systems downtime is rarely popular.
Lastly, Integrations. Again, many business people underestimate the reliance that many other company systems have on HR data. From Payroll to Regulatory reporting, from Finance systems to Access Control systems. Nearly all company systems rely on some form of people identification. Your business continuity will therefore rely on resilient integrations to your Workday system architecture and these will require testing, before go-live, and when new Workday releases are taken into production.
That is why testing, testing, testing – and maintaining the skills and capability to do so throughout the life of the system – is critical.
LogicaCloud specialise in testing and in creating automated testing to help you manage new releases and configuration changes. Our Workday managed services team can either advise your in-house support team, or take on the work at a pre-agreed price to deliver. See our offering at Logicacloud Workday Managed services.