Congratulations! You are live on Workday…now what?
Implementing Workday, or any system, is a fantastic accomplishment that never comes easy! We often talk with customers that have recently implemented, and they provide lots of great feedback about Workday, the benefits it brings to their organizations, and the stark differences and improvements it’s delivering over their legacy HCM application. We also learn about some of their challenges or pain points. We wanted to share some of that feedback and invite you to reach out if you’re experiencing similar challenges. We’d love to chat and provide you with some real-world customer examples, as well as testimonials for how we can help!
Based on this feedback and from our experience, we’ve compiled some common themes:
1. Building a Support Team – the “Proactive vs. Reactive Challenge” - This is a hurdle for a large portion of Workday customers and their support teams. Resources vary in experience, capability, skills, and involvement during the implementation. This can be a very difficult formula to navigate. As companies continue to reduce their IT footprint to save money and focus on efficiency, and ultimately gain the ROI on their Workday investment, having a properly sized and skilled team is critical to proactively manage and optimize the application.
Leigh Consulting can help augment your current staff skillset, as well as mentor and coach your team on best practices and configuration. We can also provide strategic guidance and examples for what we’ve seen work well. Being able to proactively support, and optimize Workday methodically and thoughtfully, is what leads to a terrific user experience for your workforce and drives the ROI! Leigh can help your team proactively facilitate this process to shift the paradigm or help augment your ongoing Workday operations and support team.
2. Governance - Having a governance model to help prioritize and roadmap the team’s tasks is essential to properly meet the demand of your internal customers. This should include implementing a formal bi-annual update process, examining new features to pursue, incorporating existing features never implemented, optimizing your application, implementing enhancements/projects (performance reviews, open enrollment, etc.), as well as adding visibility into the ongoing daily support tasks. We often see this critical element put on the back-burner due to the constant cycle of support items and projects. Governance models are never perfect, but they do help transition your team to be more proactive instead of remaining in a reactive mode.
Leigh Consulting has experience implementing these types of difficult processes at various organizations, and we would love to help you and share our experiences.
3. The Importance of Change Management
Question: On large software implementation projects, what are generally the first things that are cut when budgets and timelines get tight near the end? Yet, they are some of the most important pieces of the project.
Answer: Change Management and Training. After speaking with many companies and clients that have learned this lesson, this is a mistake that a lot of organizations continue to make. Some will adapt and adjust quicker and easier than others, as this topic often goes underestimated. At Leigh, we would like the opportunity to work with you and share the concepts we recommend, ways we have planned and mapped these efforts, and suggestions for what you might want to avoid.
Do these resonate with you and your team? At Leigh Consulting, our Workday Consultants have a wide breadth of experience, many of which have been on the customer side prior to joining the Leigh team. So, we’ve lived it, felt your pain, and know what it takes to help! We’re able to offer a variety of perspectives, based on real experiences. If you’re facing challenges, or just want to take your Workday environment to the next level, we would love to speak with you on how we can help with our Application Managed Services (AMS)! Contact us today at https://www.leighconsulting.com/
Scott Fast
Head of ERP and Application Managed Services
Leigh Consulting