Viasat streamlines M&A Workday effort and mitigates risk with Smart Test
About Viasat
Viasat is a global communications company headquartered in Carlsbad, California. Founded in 1986, the $2.8bn+ revenue business provides high-speed satellite broadband and secure networking to commercial and military customers, including the U.S. Department of Defense. Its 7,000 employees have grown by around 25% with a recent acquisition.
Smart Test helps us to mitigate risk and find issues faster. We now have time to look at new features and try them, which was never a possibility before.
A rapid journey to the cloud
Viasat originally managed human resources via an on-premises solution. As it grew, the communications company found the platform increasingly ill-suited to its requirements. It was heavily customised for the business Viasat had been when it originally deployed, rather than the organisation it had evolved into. This is where Workday came in - offering a cloud-based human capital management (HCM) system designed to optimise and adapt to Viasat’s evolving workforce needs.
As People & Culture Systems Manager at Viasat, Lyn Diaz explains, “I remember meeting with Workday and seeing its capabilities as a whole system. It seemed like a good fit, and once the contract was signed a partner helped us to implement the different workstreams and areas. It was a quick deployment.”
The challenge: A small team for a major data integration
Lyn and her team went through at least 18 months of Workday releases working with manual, spreadsheet-based processes. That meant tracking critical testing for four or more product updates, including regression testing, via Excel. Working this way can add time, complexity, cost and human error.
Adding to the workload was Viasat’s 2021 acquisition of another company, which meant consolidating a large volume of new HR data into Workday. The burden was particularly heavy on a small Workday team like Viasat’s, which was already tasked with managing hundreds of tests via spreadsheet.
“There’s never more than around eight to ten of us at any one time. And those people must test multiple streams, so it’s not like one person gets to focus on one thing,” Lyn explains. “You have one person that might have to test benefits, integrations, security, HCM, onboarding - we are all wearing many hats.”
The solution: Choosing an automated testing future
The size of Lyn’s team also meant it simply didn’t have the bandwidth to support more advanced functionality for Viasat HR staff. Testing was restricted to what was available by default in the Workday product, with anything else a “nice to have,” she explains.
Test automation wasn’t on the radar for Viasat, until Lyn saw a presentation at Workday Rising and began seeking testing advice from other customers via Workday Community. Lyn notes, “I was doing some research in Workday Community and came across a thread where another Kainos customer had mentioned Smart Test. Having done some of my own due diligence, it was clear that Kainos was a well-known brand and could support our integration and testing needs. I brought the idea forward to my manager who was bought in immediately and we went live not long after.”
Expectations for the product were contained to getting the basics right to minimise the risk of missing problems during testing that ended up in production. The team had a particularly challenging time keeping track of fields being deprecated, for example.
“We were just trying to get through hundreds of tests on an Excel file. We had no idea what else to be looking at,” says Lyn. “We were also hoping to benefit from time savings, because it was a huge manual effort to put together those spreadsheets. After each release, the hours that are saved, the number of tests that are run automatically - those stats are great, and every time they get provided to us, it reminds us how much work it took before Smart Test.”
The results: Streamlining the M&A burden
At Viasat, “Always a better way” is more than a motto - it’s a mindset. The better way being Smart. Viasat implemented Smart Test during the 2021 acquisition. The process was straightforward, and the product helped minimise the volume of testing required on newly imported data. Lyn comments, “We have less to test and focus on when it comes to our regression testing. I don't feel like people have as much to worry about because they know Smart Test is going to cover it, so we save a lot of time.”
Today, Smart Test helps with background tasks like spotting the cause of failures and enabling the small testing team to free-up time for higher value tasks. It also helps the team keep track of its work in a more efficient manner than the old spreadsheet-based system allowed, which benefits audit efforts. It’s good for the company and takes pressure off the testing team.
With a second acquisition under its belt in 2023, Viasat relied on Smart Test to seamlessly merge data from 1,700 new employees and mitigate any impact. Reflecting on the deliverables of this project, Lyn describes, “Smart Test helped us to mitigate risk and find issues faster. Kainos are extremely easy to partner with and the team are excellent at providing direction and examples of how to best utilise Smart Test. We now have time to look at new features and try them, which was never a possibility before,” she concludes.