Whether you are implementing Workday for the first time or are an existing Workday user, proper support is needed to ensure your Workday experience is a success. To realize the system’s full potential and adequately support your business users, Workday must be supported by resources capable of taking on many tasks. These tasks can vary from answering how-to questions, troubleshooting issues, administering recurring events, updating calendar/schedule periods, liaising with Workday, and analyzing/deploying Workday release features.

When building your support team or enhancing it, it is essential to look for the following key characteristics. These characteristics are attributes of individuals who know Workday in and out and how the industry operates. These attributes will result in a support team that can efficiently handle any Workday request.

1. Resources with Industry Experience – Support personnel with experience in the industry are more efficient than newer resources without the requisite background. In addition, these resources can understand and diagnose issues quickly and accurately as they have been through similar situations before.
2. Less Specialization – Resources knowledgeable in multiple Workday modules provide more comprehensive solutions to issues. In addition, cross-module expertise enables these resources to know what components are related, how they impact each other, and what is part of any total solution.
3. Documentation Skills – Resources that know how to create well-written documentation provide value beyond configuring Workday. The documentation they produce will be invaluable to retaining institutional and contextual knowledge, mitigate against staff turnover, and provide a knowledge base for others to leverage.

Resources with Industry Experience

It is important not to fixate only on what resources know in Workday. Knowing the ins and outs of the industry is just as valuable. This knowledge is gained only through experience and provides a perspective on how things are supposed to work regardless of the kind of system.

For example, it is quite common for terminating employees at Asset Managers to be subject to a Garden Leave policy where the terminated worker is essentially paid not to work for a set amount of time after their termination. Workday does not come pre-configured with the means to put someone on Garden Leave; it will be up to your firm to configure this. Resources with experience administering and using Garden Leaves will know how to configure it properly. In Workday, the easy part is setting up the Garden Leave itself so that the terminations could go on leave and not terminate until the end of their Leave. However, there are additional considerations to review regarding whether Garden Leave terminations should be included in active headcount, where they should sit in your organization, or whether they should be visible to employees outside of HR. Support resources knowledgeable about Garden Leaves would know how to configure Workday optimally, focusing on the pitfalls to look out for and specific reporting requirements.

This is just one specific example; however, with so many moving pieces for a feature commonly used by Asset Managers, it is critical to vet resources on their knowledge of Workday and how they have applied Workday to meet HR policies at other firms in the same industry.

Less Specialization

Having less specialization in a specific Workday component may seem counterintuitive, but in our experience, it is quite the opposite. Sure, a specialist in a particular Workday module can expertly configure its module. However, this specialization comes at a cost where they cannot configure other modules or realize the more significant impact a request may have on other areas of Workday.

As a result, a specialist may not be able to implement a comprehensive solution. Or, their lack of knowledge of other Workday components would introduce complexities when handoff and coordination are required between multiple resources.

For example, in Workday Financials, you can set up a Punchout where Workday integrates with a vendor allowing you to purchase items (like office supplies or computer hardware) directly from the vendor, and the order information would flow directly into Financials. Setting this up would involve creating a Purchase Order, matching the invoice, capitalizing the asset (if applicable), and setting up a depreciation schedule. Again, a resource that was knowledgeable in multiple Workday components would be able to advise you on what to watch out for and the best path to implement the solution.

Documentation Skills

The most overlooked attribute when evaluating Workday resources is the mindset and ability to document everything and do it well. Documentation is critical as resolving Workday issues is often an involved process involving researching the subject, implementing the solution, and testing multiple scenarios. Furthermore, many types of problems and projects repeat themselves (i.e., an employee thinks their Time Off Balance is incorrect, Performance Cycles happen twice a year, annual Open Enrollment, and new time off plans). Documentation can prevent having to research and resolve the same issues more than once.

Proper and well-written documentation will preserve the work done, allowing you to retain institutional knowledge, lessen the impact of any resource turnover, and enable work to be done more efficiently. The team will spend less time re-examining common issues, attempting to understand past decisions, and more time resolving the actual problem.

Retaining knowledge of your existing setup is particularly relevant across the alternative investment client base, where firms often devise complex allocation rules to determine the true profitability of each business line.   These rules result in a ‘fully-loaded’ P&L by business line and can be used in some cases to determine the compensation of portfolio managers, traders, or other essential employees associated with the business. In some cases, firms will want access to this P&L but not have it truly posted in the general ledger and instead use it for reporting purposes. This necessitates customized reporting that may exclude or include these allocations depending upon the view of the person running the report. When troubleshooting or modifying these reports, it may take a resource that is unfamiliar with the setup much longer and may lead them to recommend modifications that are not appropriate. It may also require lengthy explanations from the business that is not the best use of time and could otherwise be avoided.  

Conclusion

Successfully supporting Workday is not easy, as there are many types of users to deal with and a wide array of issues to resolve. Therefore, selecting the proper staff to support Workday is in your best interest. Your support personnel must be capable of working with multiple Workday components, documenting solutions and decisions well, and having knowledge of the business to create solutions that fit within the industry. By recognizing and evaluating resources against these critical traits, you will be well-positioned to field the right Workday support team for your organization.

FinServ’s long history servicing the world’s top Alternative Asset Managers, combined with our deep Workday expertise, make us a natural option to help you find a world-class Workday support team.