Workday stabilisation strategies for post go-live success
Going live is just the beginning of your Workday journey. As attention shifts from deployment to delivering the full potential of Workday, it becomes vital to optimise workflows, embrace new features, and champion user adoption and engagement.
Depending on the scale and complexity of your deployment, configuring Workday to meet your long-term business needs can take from a few months to several years. Here, we outline the priorities and planning considerations that are key to delivering a stable, scalable configuration.
Post-deployment priorities for a Workday operations team
Once your new system is live, it's crucial to embed Workday fully into your business operations and ensure system stability. This positions Workday to improve efficiency and effectiveness in managing HR and financial processes. Key priorities to consider:
Refine new Business Processes (BPs)
When you compare your current workflow requests with Workday’s capabilities, you can determine if Workday is meeting your business needs. This allows you to adjust your configuration to streamline and rationalise processes, maximising effectiveness.
Integration maintenance
Deploy the right experience and resources in your business to maintain integration integrity and ensure seamless data flow between systems. This keeps critical processes like payroll, for example, fully functional from day one.
Proactive issue resolution
Users often report a high volume of issues immediately after go-live. Track and prioritise requests through your ticketing system, and regularly review processes to address bottlenecks and implement enhancements, enabling Workday to meet business needs more quickly.
Test for a secure, stable configuration
As a workflow-based solution, changes to one element of Workday can have unintended impacts on other areas of your configuration. Ongoing regression testing helps to mitigate this risk by identifying issues before they have a negative impact on usability or security.
Build governance, security and compliance processes
During stabilisation, system volatility and a large volume of workforce change can create conflicts and heighten risk. Continuous reviews are resource-intensive but necessary for proactive risk mitigation, continuous compliance and security confidence. These focus areas include:
Access controls
Review privileged access during periods of high change frequency to prevent unintentional granting of unauthorised access to sensitive data and tasks in Workday.
Activity monitoring
Proactively monitor privileged users to identify high-risk behavior, such as accessing C-suite sensitive data after hours, to safeguard information and compliance.
Segregation of duties
With potential intersections in role-based security, monitoring conflicts is critical to prevent potential breaches and fraud.
Configuration changes
Monitor and report on approved configuration changes as part of ongoing audits. Maintain clear tracking and documentation to stay proactive and ensure regulatory compliance. Learn more about configuration control and change management in our comprehensive guide.
Invest in operational teams
From internal modification to bi-annual releases, Workday undergoes constant change to optimise the user experience and deliver improved value for your business. Your Workday support teams needs the right mix of experience and skills, with clearly defined roles and responsibilities to make the most of these features and enhancements.
For most enterprises, a typical team structure consists of:
- Core Workday Operations team with specific technical skills to manage configuration, release management, tenant management, integrations, security and reporting
- Functional Analysts, Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) or Business Product Owners to focus on their subject area and embed workflows into the business
- External consultants to provide additional expertise for large projects
Operational teams often focus on business-as-usual (BAU) work, which then requires SMEs to provide support such as regression testing during bi-annual releases. Plan effectively, provide training, and leverage automated tools to help operational teams maximise efficiency and quality assurance, freeing SMEs to focus on higher-value initiatives.
Encourage adoption through a positive user experience
Workday unifies multiple systems and workflows under one platform, introducing new interfaces, processes, and ways of working for your teams. Focus on training, adoption, and user experience to extract value from your investment and enable your business to leverage the full power of Workday. Key priorities include:
Training
Create easy-to-use onboarding resources and training materials to ensure a smooth transition. These should be updated after each release and used when onboarding new employees.
On-going enablement
Deliver enablement sessions post go-live and during periods of significant change. Upskilling prevents employees from feeling overwhelmed and helps encourage the use of new features and functionality.
Develop a culture of engagement
Many businesses introduce change champions to help facilitate training, Q&A sessions and drop-in clinics to engage with their Workday users. Others may use newsletters and surveys to improve the user experience.
Build a long-term roadmap
In addition to investing in resources and teams, businesses should create a change implementation roadmap to successfully balance ongoing improvements with new feature adoption. An effective roadmap ensures that the platform continues to meet evolving needs while enabling the latest features to drive greater efficiency, agility, and growth. Roadmaps encompass:
Workday weekly updates
Workday constantly seeks to improve performance and functionality with smaller weekly updates that are rolled out to all customers simultaneously.
Workday bi-annual Feature Releases
Major bi-annual feature releases deliver improved value and user experiences. With a mixture of optional and compulsory updates, your roadmap should seek to take full advantage of new features. Find out more about bi-annual release testing in this guide.
Business change
During stabilisation, there will be a high volume of business changes as you transition from hypercare and embed new workflows into the business.
Project enhancements
Enhancements can range from small Workday updates to large scale rollouts like bonus structures and annual benefits changes.
Phase X deployments
The stabilisation phase is an opportunity to optimise your configuration but, as your business changes and looks to upgrade Workday’s functionality, additional modules may be required to continue meeting needs. Ensuring effective stabilisation and building a well-planned roadmap will help to build a strong foundation to launch expansion (also known as Phase X) projects.
Due to their often extensive nature, releases, updates and changes require cross-functional collaboration. Operational teams often require support from a range of SMEs to review and implement features, identify potential impact on your configuration and support with regression testing. So, a robust roadmap will help to understand these requirements, plan accordingly and deliver success.
Stabilise with the help of automation
Navigating the post-deployment phase of Workday is critical to your ongoing success. During this phase, the right strategies and tools empower you to configure a stable and efficient system that acts as a springboard for business-wide innovation and growth.
Manually managing change, configuring security policies, and optimising BPs while delivering training, engaging users, and embedding Workday creates significant operational challenges. Stretched SMEs and under-pressure operational teams lead to delays, errors, and risks that prevent Workday from delivering the results you need.
With automation, you can streamline every aspect of the stabilisation process. Faster, error-free testing lets you validate configuration changes, review critical integrations, and evaluate efficiency, ensuring Workday is at its best. This gives you the confidence that processes function correctly, Workday meets business needs, and changes don’t cause disruption.
Robust out-of-the-box security controls and proactive monitoring help you manage access, provide oversight of risk, and simplify auditing. Enhanced oversight lets you navigate security despite system volatility, safeguarding your data and ensuring compliance from day one.
Automation is a powerful tool that you can leverage to build a configuration that is stable, defect-free, and able to support your users from day one.
Discover how automation is helping businesses to stabilise, scale operations and deliver value.
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