Just bought Workday? Eight Smart steps for maximum success
After you have made your choice to adopt Workday, it is essential to shift your focus towards achieving a smooth transition and guaranteeing a successful implementation of the platform. The level of readiness for change within your organisation is a crucial factor that significantly influences the success of deployment.
It can be quite challenging to overcome resistance, manage employee expectations and obtain support from key stakeholders. However, by anticipating these hurdles and proactively addressing them through meticulous planning, effective communication and engaging stakeholders, you can enhance the efficiency of deploying Workday and significantly increase the likelihood of a successful implementation.
Follow these crucial Smart steps to enhance HR processes, streamline workflows, gain greater confidence and maximise success.
1. Identify your deployment partner
Your Workday implementation is a collaborative effort that combines the strengths of your business, digital transformation expertise, and Workday’s exceptional technology. When these elements work together harmoniously, your Workday deployment can truly be extraordinary. Ahead of you are challenging decisions, which is why it is crucial to select an experienced deployment partner who can assist you in planning the tactical aspects of your Workday implementation.
Choosing a provider whose services align closely with your business needs and have the capability to adapt alongside your organisation is paramount for both a successful deployment and long-term success with Workday. When you choose a partnership with Kainos, our experts and products are there to support you every step of the way and are an extension of your team and your toolkit. Find out more on how Kainos can help start your Workday deployment on the right path.
2. Build your team
Once you have chosen your deployment partner, it is crucial to gather your internal resources. Begin by assessing your organisation’s readiness for change and ensuring that key stakeholders are aligned with the implementation process. Establish a well-defined project plan, clearly define roles and responsibilities and effectively communicate the benefits of adopting Workday to your employees. Both Workday and your deployment partner can assist you in setting appropriate expectations for the team and their managers, ensuring that resources are identified and properly aligned.
Successful teams prioritise education and communication by sharing the deployment vision, objectives, scope and timeline with all stakeholders. It is common for Workday projects to encounter difficulties when key team members are not readily available. To avoid issues, it is important to establish clear expectations for time commitments, and make contingency plans to prevent potential delays. Critical stages such as design, customer confirmation, data analysis, privacy and security, testing and go-live demand a high level of availability from SMEs.
3. Promote the benefits of Workday
The implementation of Workday brings about significant changes to HR processes and workflows. Successfully navigating through challenges such as resistance to change, ensuring user adoption and providing comprehensive training and support is crucial.
Prior to going live, it is important to identify colleagues who can serve as advocates for Workday and effectively communicate its benefits within your organisation. Collaborating with influential stakeholders from various departments can greatly assist in each phase of the deployment. Whether assigning them formal roles or leveraging their feedback and input, having a team of internal champions is vital for conveying the advantages that Workday will bring to the overall employee experience. Going live marks just the initial step in the journey, so it is important to maintain momentum and plan for the gradual adoption of new features and functional areas to support the evolving business needs.
4. Prepare your data and processes
Transferring data from legacy systems to Workday can be intricate and time-consuming. Collaborate with your business owners and IT teams to identify data sources, assess data quality and potential risks at an early stage. Consider the data you need from employees and review your job catalogue to begin collecting data effectively, assigning a dedicated SME responsible for data collection, privacy and error resolution. It is also important to understand your organisation and its landscape, including the people, processes and technologies that will be impacted by the implementation of Workday. Remember to address country-specific legal, data privacy and regulatory concerns.
Prepare for critical-path items such as reports, integrations and other existing systems to determine the most important data to migrate or transfer. Utilise this opportunity to clean up your data and consolidate it across multiple systems. Integrating Workday with other systems such as payroll, time and attendance and recruitment platforms may require extensive configuration and customisation. Define the required Workday business processes, workflows and security roles within the system.
5. Developing a comprehensive testing strategy
Define competencies that can be leveraged in the long term and explore ways to streamline and automate policies. Developing a comprehensive testing strategy is essential to validate the system’s functionality and ensure data accuracy. A well-planned and executed test strategy will save time in the long run. Key areas for testing should include data, business processes, integrations and security. Choosing an automated solution like, Smart Test enables your organisation to streamline the testing process, saving time and effort compared to manual testing. Smart Test ensures all critical aspects of the Workday deployment are thoroughly tested and provides comprehensive reporting and analysis capabilities, offering insights into test results, coverage and potential issues or errors. This enables your organisation to quickly identify and resolve any issues, ensuring a smoother deployment success.
Investing effort in deep cleaning and thorough data handling and automated testing will yield significant benefits in the future. By redesigning your processes early, you will be better prepared to adapt to Workday as you introduce new features and functionality. During system updates or enhancements, Smart Test facilitates regression testing by automatically identifying and executing relevant test cases to verify that existing functionalities are not affected by the changes. This helps mitigate the risk of regression issues and ensures stability of Workday.
6. Implement a strong governance structure
Implementing a feature-rich system, like Workday is complex. Without proper planning, your deployment may suffer from delays and budget overruns which could impact its overall success. To mitigate these risks, it is crucial to establish well-defined governance structures owned by project stakeholders. Given that Workday contains sensitive employee information, data security and privacy must be prioritised. Implementing appropriate security measures, defining access controls and complying with relevant data protection regulations such as GDPR are vital.
Smart Audit ensures a robust governance structure throughout implementation projects by meticulously examining and validating Workday controls and configurations to ensure their accurate alignment with new operational practices. This guarantees the seamless continuity of your operations while ensuring data privacy, compliance with internal controls and adherence to regulations.
By conducting comprehensive audits of crucial controls across segregation of duties (SoD), access reviews, configuration changes, as well as monitoring user activity, Smart Audit swiftly identifies and addresses security threats before they become a problem. With its continuous security monitoring, organisations can proactively detect and resolve compliance issues during the critical system setup phase, minimising the risks associated with malicious activity, fraud or human error.
To further strengthen Workday security controls, organisations can utilise Smart Shield, a robust data masking tool which acts as a secure layer between your organisation’s most sensitive data and the teams responsible for supporting and maintaining Workday. With Smart Shield, your organisation can effortlessly and seamlessly mask sensitive information within Workday, even in complex scenarios involving multiple teams and external partners, without causing disruptions to the user experience.
With its comprehensive data masking capabilities, Smart Shield empowers teams to strike a balance between data accessibility and security and ensures only authorised individuals have access to sensitive data across all non-production tenants, maintaining the confidentiality and integrity of your organisation’s critical information. By utilising Smart Shield, your organisation can establish a robust defence mechanism that safeguards data, effectively mitigating potential threats and maintaining compliance with data privacy regulations.
7. Plan for post-deployment
It is crucial to proactively plan for the effective management and maintenance of Workday after the go-live phase. This forward-thinking approach will shape your strategy for roll-out, training, resource allocation and design decisions. It is essential to include post-implementation maintenance, updates, audits and ongoing support requirements in your plans. Staying updated with regulatory requirements and best practices related to data privacy, security and compliance is vital to effectively mitigate and control risks.
Smart Audit transforms the Workday auditing process by automating the detection and prioritisation of security risks. With out-of-the-box SOC I & II certified preventative and detective controls, Smart Audit aligns with your risk perspective and addresses critical concerns such as segregation of duties, access reviews, change management, and user activity monitoring. By swiftly detecting and responding to security threats, Smart Audit mitigates the risks of malicious activity, fraud, or human error while providing auditable evidence of compliance with internal controls and data privacy regulations.
Smart Audit empowers organisations to maintain control over their Workday configuration by monitoring and tracking system changes. Unauthorised or unintended modifications are flagged, ensuring that Workday remains aligned with established configuration standards. It's always-on security monitoring helps organisations proactively identify and address compliance issues as they arise, allowing teams to adapt to changing regulations or internal policies. By leveraging Smart Audit, organisations can enhance their post-Workday deployment efforts by ensuring compliance, strengthening security controls, and maintaining the integrity and privacy of employee data.
8. Avoid any delays in your implementation, safeguard your strategy with Smart.
While the challenges associated with Workday deployment can look overwhelming, with Smart these issues can be quickly mitigated or avoided all together. From your test plan strategy to data privacy and compliance, Kainos have you covered. Workday customers who use Smart typically experience 26x more risk coverage, a 70% reduction in manual auditing and have been able to save thousands of hours with automated testing.