Get the most out of your cloud HR investment by avoiding or fixing these common Workday implementation failures. This is part one of a two-part series.
It’s easy to succumb to standard project pitfalls when approaching a Workday implementation. Understanding time and budget are crucial inputs to determining project success, and their impact becomes especially pronounced with longer Workday implementations that average more than eight months.
Mistake #1: Failing to define the scope and complexity of the project
In order to accurately plan for your Workday implementation, it’s important to accurately define the scope and complexity of the engagement. Not specifying requirements up front leads to time delays as designs need to be revisited and adjusted to include the new information. Not enough granularity in the scope definition creates a lack of clarity that leads to confusion and can result in change orders to adjust the project scope to meet the organization’s actual needs. In order to effectively and efficiently implement Workday without failures, it’s necessary to acknowledge the dependencies of cloud configuration on accurate preparation for the complex representation of functional and technical requirements within the configuration.
Mistake #2: Failing to define the needs of each implementation phase upfront
Implementation planning can also be improved by understanding and defining the needs for each implementation phase upfront. Whether using a traditional waterfall methodology, a faster agile method, or a hybrid approach, it’s important to clearly outline the required activities and desired outcomes from each project phase to ensure coverage of all organizational needs.
Beyond the explicit technology requirements, it’s important to align on testing objectives, change management strategy, and always be mindful that HR technology changes involve a wide-scale deployment that typically impacts a company’s entire user population. Keeping an eye on the end goal also allows for better deployment planning and knowledge transfer, enabling internal workers to effectively manage and use the new HR system.
Often, due to the easy-to-use reputation cloud technology has, companies find themselves underestimating the effort needed to support knowledge transfer and product adoption. Ending an implementation with big gaps in knowledge and ongoing usage support can be a costly mistake in terms of resources and the company’s bottom line. Managing a Workday system requires deep domain expertise in functional business processes including end-to-end design, dependencies with other departments, as well as compliance and security maintenance. In this difficult landscape, it’s important to staff your implementation project with resources who have the ability to manage complex situations, distill and document requirements, and understand where optimizations are necessary to support the Workday implementation.
Once your resources are engaged, they can prepare for the project by collecting, reviewing, and updating documentation of existing relevant business processes. Many Workday implementations fall short because organizations are still spending time understanding the depth and breadth of existing processes well into the implementation timeline. This means they lose opportunities for considering how to modify or update existing processes to accommodate and adapt to Workday functionality without decreasing performance or user experience.
By preparing well in advance to understand your existing HR technology landscape, areas for optimization, and available project resources your organization can feel confident moving forward with even the most complex HR transformations enabled by Workday.
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Common Workday Implementation Failures Part 2
Get the most out of your cloud HR investment by avoiding or fixing these common Workday implementation failures.