Questions to Ask Your Potential Workday AMS Partner

Go-live is the start of your Workday operating life, not the end of the project. The AMS partner you sign up will shape your time to value, your adoption, and the cost of every change you make for the next three years. Choose poorly and you spend that time arguing about ticket triage instead of optimising the system.

A good AMS partner supplements your internal team and lifts adoption. A bad one becomes a second SI you cannot fire. The questions below are how you tell them apart before you sign.

Define what you want from post-production support

Self-sufficiency or full outsource? The two paths look similar in a sales deck and produce completely different operating models, rate cards, and contracts. Decide first, then evaluate vendors against that decision. A vendor that excels at one rarely excels at the other.

Key questions to ask your potential Workday Managed Services provider

1. Account management and executive oversight.
   Is there a dedicated Account Manager or Client Partner? If partially dedicated, how many other accounts do they hold? Are they geographically aligned with your teams? Are they Workday Project Management certified? What is the escalation path beyond them?

2. Team structure.
   How is the team structured? Remote or office-based? Onshore, nearshore, or offshore? Dedicated, partial, or pooled resources? Do you have to set up new customer service accounts each time a new resource picks up your ticket? Where does the AMS team sit in the organisation chart? Full-time employees or contractors? Do most of them come from deployment backgrounds or from the client side?

3. Tenure and certifications.
   What is the average tenure of AMS team employees? What is the average number of certifications per consultant?

4. Service level agreements.
   Time zone coverage, ticket triage, priority definitions, response times. How do they manage team capacity without breaching SLAs?

5. Future and unplanned work.
   Is there a separate rate card for unplanned work? How is it estimated, managed, staffed, and prioritised?

6. Approach to change management.
   Do they offer change management as a service? Do they create or update job aids?

7. Roadmapping.
   Does the AMS vendor run roadmap sessions? These should map cyclical events and key milestones across the year, including new modules and functionality.

8. Feature releases.
   How do they manage the Feature Release cycle? Automated regression testing? Tenant-specific webinars and recommendations?

9. Pricing structure.
   Flexible or fixed monthly? Ad-hoc or pay-per-use? Geographic hourly rate cards? Do hours carry over month to month? Quarterly true-ups? Work out which model fits your organisation before you compare commercials.

10. Contracts.

    How easily can contracts be amended or cancelled? Annual inflation clauses? Early termination clauses or multi-year discounts?

11. Integration monitoring and automated testing.

    Most AMS providers claim integration monitoring. What is the actual tool? How does it alert your team? Homegrown or off-the-shelf? Same question for automated testing: own solution or a strategic partner?

12. Ramp time.

    How long will it take the AMS team to get up to speed on your configuration and integrate into your operating model?

13. Innovation.

    What does the vendor bring to the table beyond ticket support? Pre-built dashboards or reports? At what cost?

14. Communication channels.

    How do you talk to the team day to day? Which channels are open, which are gated through the Account Manager?

15. Attrition.

    When attrition happens (and it will), how is it handled? Knowledge transfer process? Continuity guarantees in the contract?

16. Governance.

    Ask for a sample status report. What metrics? What KPIs? Meeting cadence: daily stand-ups, weekly statuses, monthly executive read-outs? What tool is used for reporting? Can you see real-time ticket status and small-project updates?

17. Customer satisfaction programme, references, testimonials.

    Understand their Customer Success function, if they have one. Talk to their references and other Workday customers. Do they publish a Workday-specific newsletter? How do they measure customer satisfaction?

18. Clients transitioned to AMS.

    If the provider is also a Workday deployment partner, what percentage of their deployment clients transitioned to their AMS service? How many are still active?

19. Client recovery stories.

    Ask for a story about a relationship they saved. If they have never had a client issue, that is a red flag, not a badge.

20. Why customers choose not to use them.

    A vendor who can answer this honestly is telling you where their model breaks. A vendor who cannot is telling you something else.

The right AMS partner protects the value you have just built. The wrong one quietly erodes it. Use these questions before you sign, not after the first incident.