As we head into the new year, FinServ has been working with clients to develop Post Go-Live Workday project plans. To best prepare for 2019 your Workday team will need to develop a plan that includes additional functionality rollouts, annual system maintenance, and preparation for Workday’s system releases. FinServ has worked with clients to develop their post Workday Go-Live project plans, below are a few steps we recommend:

1. Start with your laundry list. It’s best to first hold a brainstorming session with your team to write down every Workday initiative including new functionality, system enhancements, maintenance, and data improvements that your team wants to accomplish both in the short term and the long term. We recommend assigning each task with an estimated duration for how many collective hours it will take your team to complete each task.

2. Identify which of these items require a business decision or further discovery. Oftentimes clients will put action items onto their plan that are unrealistic or end up not making sense for the business. For instance, if you want to leverage manager self-service, take the time to speak with your managers to make sure that they are interested in this functionality and have the bandwidth to train and test. Oftentimes an initiative like manager self-service  is put on the plan and it either gets pushed to be completed later on in the year or doesn’t happen at all because your team quickly discovers that the functionality won’t meet the manager’s requirements or the managers simply don’t have the time to dedicate to the initiative. Be selective as to which action items do make it onto the plan so that you set your team up for success. 

3. Don’t underestimate system maintenance. Anyone familiar with Workday knows that Workday requires a fair amount of daily maintenance. If you’re a growing firm your team will likely spend a big chunk of their time creating new bespoke roles, security groups, or segmented security for new members of your team. For example, you may have a new HR member join your team and you’d like to give them Workday that excludes visibility to your HR team’s Compensation data. This type of request would require a new role and a lot of testing before you’d be able to assign the role to the new user. There are also the semiannual releases that your team will need to plan around. Each semiannual release comes with many new features that need to be tested to make sure they don’t impact your Workday environment or have any impact on other integrated systems.

4. Get the business’s input. It’s important that this plan doesn’t just work for your Workday team but it works for your HR / Finance teams and the other department heads. Once you have a draft of your project plan sit down with other parts of the business to get their input. It is important that you have their support and oftentimes you may discover other use cases they may have for how their team can better leverage the system. 

5. Review annually. As you near year-end it’s important that your team reviews the plan and determines how successful they were at executing against the plan. It’s also important to track how accurate the plan was compared to what was accomplish throughout the year, you may be surprised by how many unexpected tasks came up throughout the year (one of our clients created more than 20 new security roles).  Once you’ve reviewed the plan it’s time to start the process all over again for the new year! 

To learn more about FinServ Consulting’s services, please contact us at info@www.finservconsulting.com or (646) 603-3799.