In today’s market landscape, many organizations are prioritizing internal optimization, strengthening their operations, increasing data access, and mitigating security and other IT risks. Whether you are an SMB or Fortune 500 company, selecting Workday as your Enterprise Management Cloud Platform can yield significant benefits. With its comprehensive suite of cloud-based applications, Workday integrates various business functions, streamlining processes and enhancing overall efficiency. However, investing in the system is just the beginning of the transformation journey. To ensure a successful Workday deployment and maximize user adoption across your employee base, consider the following key areas, with the support of an advisory services, business application consulting, or Application Management Services (AMS) partner:
Strategic and Business Areas
- Engage Stakeholders to define and agree upon the goals and objectives for deploying the Workday Enterprise Management Cloud Platform. Aligning priorities, timelines, and resources across the organization will be instrumental to success and will result in better decision making for the overall Workday deployment and the resulting security and data processes.
- Change Management and Training - Identify the key change agents within the organization, assess training requirements, pinpoint areas of resistance to change, and build a stakeholder engagement strategy to address concerns. While change can be challenging, it is extremely important to not only focus on what is changing but also identify “WHY” it is changing and the benefits it brings to each stakeholder.
- Define a continuous improvement process - Workday’s platform is always improving and providing more ways to drive your business. It is important that you have an approach and team in place to focus on aligning the changing needs of your organization with the innovations from Workday that your company can leverage.
- Define your success KPIs - Measuring success in large transformations poses challenges due to the investment of time, energy, and resources. It is important to define key performance indicators (KPIs) that will be impacted by the Workday deployment transformation, outline expected benefits, and most importantly, determine a baseline at the project's start. Realize that these targets may not be met on Go Live but will typically be achieved over time. Establishing a regular measurement interval that can be integrated into the continuous improvement process mentioned above, will keep your organization aligned on goals, illustrate benefits to the broader organization, and most importantly helps achieve any ROI objectives your firm has set.
Technology Areas
- Data migration and cleanup - Moving data to a new system provides a fantastic opportunity to remediate legacy data structure issues, backup obsolete data for security purposes, eliminate redundant data, and better align your firm’s data management strategy.
- Develop a data management strategy - While Workday has a robust data architecture that helps ensure data consistency, developing a solid master data management strategy is equally vital. Devise a plan on how your business expects to use the data and designate data stewards to oversee the execution of the plan, ensuring adherence to the defined business rules for data usage. Maintaining accurate data over the long term requires periodic updates to these definitions and rules to align historical reporting and future reporting needs.
- Data integration- Workday will be one part of a much larger data ecosystem that is managed by your firm. Developing the right integration strategy that manages the volume, security, and varying formats of incoming data will prevent production outages in the future, enable cost effective monitoring of data pipelines, and reduce overall support costs.
- Release management and testing strategy - Workday is continuously enhancing its features and supporting its customers’ needs. It is important your team has a process in place to leverage these features effectively within your firm and a proper testing strategy to ensure the long-term support and benefits of the system. Determining when to turn on features, adjusting training and change management processes, updating integration code, and modifying data management and reporting requirements must all be carefully considered before adding or changing features within your Workday environment.
Conclusion
Selecting Workday as your Enterprise Management Cloud Platform is a strategic move toward enhancing efficiency and driving business success. By following these steps and investing in careful planning, engagement, and training, you can ensure a smooth and successful implementation that transforms your business processes and unlocks the full potential of your Workday.
Discover how The Groove can help you with your Workday journey. Contact us today to learn how we can help you.
