#Workday Implementation? Top 10 Tips

Your team just wrapped up the final negotiations on your #Workday Master Subscription Agreement and most likely you have chosen your implementation partner.

Now the fun is about to start - the implementation.

Consider these 10 tips when embarking on your Workday implementation journey.

1. Assemble the right team: The right team will be a mix of functional, technical and change champions. Do you need to hire backfills or temporary workers? Do you have a resource commitment chart showing anticipated hours per work for each team member? Have you determined who will sit on the Executive Steering Committee? Have you identified the Project Manager?

2. Decisions: Timely, efficient, and documented: Enforce timely and efficient decision making processes to keep the project momentum going. Document the decisions in a log. To help pitfalls of analysis paralysis, take a look at these 5 tips.

   
   

3. Start talking to 3rd party vendors (yesterday): Often times implementation partners can move faster than your 3rd party vendors when it comes to developing integrations to the likes of medical, dental, 401K, and banking vendors. Start these conversations yesterday. Talk about their testing timelines, requirements, sign-off process. Does the vendor have a Project Manager? Does the vendor need to stand up a test environment? sFTP or other data transport requirements? Have you shared the project timeline? Set up recurring weekly meetings. Another hint: include your functional experts in integration design meetings and include the proper folks from IT. If you have not engaged your 3rd party vendors, you are already behind the eight ball.

   
   

4. Focus on the data: Everyone reading this has heard of "garbage in, garbage out." Clean data is one key to success. Conduct Readiness Workshops to analyze the data and understand the new Workday foundational elements. Spend the time upfront to understand what data will be needed, how it will be extracted, transformed, and when it will be needed according to the project plan. Understand the concept of the "Data Freeze" and develop a plan on how you will capture and enter/upload into the system after the freeze.

   
   

5. Pressure test the timeline: Take a deep look into the project plan and timeline. Look at the company Holiday schedule, look at the school district fall and spring breaks, consolidate all of the vacation requests of core team members. Consider internal audit requirements. Hopefully your implementation partner has taken payroll processing and pay dates into the equation to back into a "go-live" date? A "July 1st" Go-Live could actually mean that you are moving to the production environment on June 10th. Do you have time in your plan to do catch-up transactions? Are you going to have a soft-launch before releasing to the masses? Do you have enough time in the schedule for adequate end-to-end testing?

   
   

6. Develop Guiding Principles: Refer back to the guiding principles before every design meeting and/or in testing. It will help keep the project on track and the team focused with the tasks at hand (which will be many!)

   
   

7. Don't let the Statement of Work become shelf-ware: I am not suggesting that you refer back to the statement of work at all times during the implementation, but know what you signed up for. Understand the scope, understand what is out of scope. Understand the terms, definitions, with focus on terminology that you may not be comfortable with - know what "position management" means. Often times, the sales process may not involve all of the functional and technical leads - so do a thorough review of the SOW with the implementation partner before kick-off. Also do not be afraid of change, in fact, prepare for it. I have not been on a project where there is not a change order of some sort. Change orders are not a bad thing - they can remove, add, or swap out functionality.

   
   

8. Train, Train, Train: My father always told me if you want to get better - you have to "practice, practice, practice." Please take the time to attend Workday training courses as prescribed by the project and training plan. By empowering the team with Workday knowledge in the beginning, they will be better equipped to make better decisions upfront and they will start owning the system. Don't be afraid to delegate someone to come back to the team and share knowledge from training.

   
   

9. Own testing: While your implementation partner will provide you with a great starting point of standard unit test scenarios for each of the modules that will be implemented - it is nothing more than a canned set of common scenarios that should be considered. Although there are definitely some that may think so, consultants actually do not know your business or processes more than you. Document a thorough test strategy. Document scenarios applicable to the business. Consider integrations. Document results. Conduct negative and positive testing.

   
   

10. KISS Principle: Keep it Simple: Do not over-engineer the solution. It is easy to say "that's the way that we have always done things." Do not design for exceptions. Embrace the native Workday application. Make sure the team understands Workday is highly configurable, but not customizable. Focus on best practices that are delivered by the Workday solution. Use the Workday Community to learn from others. Ask yourself - do you really need all of those notifications or steps in the business process?

What other advice would you give to customers that are embarking upon their Workday implementation journey?