Are You Prepared for your Workday Implementation?

Implementing Workday, a comprehensive cloud-based Human Capital Management, Payroll, and Financial Management suite, is a significant project that requires careful planning and execution. Here are some best practices to consider when preparing for a Workday implementation:

Assemble the Implementation Team and Governance Structure

A proper governance structure during a Workday implementation helps ensure that the transformation project stays on track, meets its objectives, and aligns with the organization's strategic goals. Effective governance involves establishing clear leadership, decision making processes, and oversight mechanisms. Key elements to consider include:

• Executive Sponsorship: Identify engaged Executives to champion the project, provide strategic direction, ensure resources are dedicated to the project, and help with resolution of issues.
• Project Management Office (PMO): Establish a PMO to oversee project planning, execution, and communication activities.
• Workstream Leads: For each functional workstream in scope, assign leads who will be responsible for specific deliverables and activities.

Define Project Scope and Objectives

Defining the scope of a Workday implementation sets the boundaries and expectations of the project. Here is how to approach defining scope:

• Business Requirements: Identify the strategic goals and desired outcomes of your organization. 
• Stakeholder Needs: Engage with stakeholders across the organization to gather requirements and expectations. 
• Systems and Processes: Evaluate your current systems to identify gaps and areas for potential optimization to determine which processes to enhance or redesign in Workday.
• Integration Strategy: Determine which systems need to integrate with Workday and develop a strategy that outlines the approach and tools to be used.
• Functional Scope: Workday offers a range of functionalities. Based on your business requirements and stakeholder needs, decide which modules are essential for your implementation.

Establish a Project Plan

• Timeline, Phases, and Priorities: Establish a realistic timeline with key milestones, keeping in mind any blackout periods for the project team and other strategic projects. It may be beneficial to phase the implementation, which would involve determining which modules are most important and should be implemented first.
• Budget: Set a budget that includes recurring software licenses, one-time implementation costs, consulting fees, internal resource allocation, and potential backfills.

Prepare Your Data 

Data preparation is essential to help ensure the accuracy, consistency, and integrity of data that is being transferred from existing systems to the new Workday platform.

• Data Inventory: Identify all sources that contain data to be migrated to Workday and create an inventory of data types.
• Data Cleansing: Evaluate any discrepancies, duplicates, and incomplete data in existing systems to help ensure data quality.
• Data Mapping: Determine how data from existing systems will map to Workday fields. This may involve transforming data formats and values to align with Workday's structure. 

Prepare for Change

Change management is critical to a successful Workday implementation because it informs and prepares all stakeholders for the change.

• Stakeholder impact: Conduct an analysis to understand how the transformation will affect various parts of the organization and identify potential sources of resistance.
• Change strategy: Determine a change management approach, considering the organization's culture, vision for the implementation, history with transformation initiatives, and the scale of the implementation. Establish KPIs and implement feedback mechanisms to measure the effectiveness of change management activities.
• Change team: Identify change champions who can advocate for the change as well as individuals who will be responsible for execution of the change management strategy.
• Communications plan: Establish communication goals and develop a clear messaging strategy to outline reasons for the change, benefits of Workday, and how the transformation will impact individuals.
• Training support: Assess the training needs of user groups within the organization, develop a comprehensive training program, and establish support structures to assist users post go live.

Every Workday transformation is unique, and your organization's needs, processes, and stakeholders will influence how you approach these steps, which ideally will set the stage for a successful implementation that delivers on its promises and supports your organization's goals.