Fall is upon us and so is Workday’s 2024R2 release! Whether newly on Workday this year or a seasoned customer, all companies should work to prepare for this Fall’s latest release to ensure they are taking full advantage of all the release benefits.
Check out the following details to learn how your organization can prepare, implement & sustain your Workday system during this upcoming release.
What To Expect
Workday releases new features and functional enhancements twice a year in March and September. These releases allow Workday to remain secure, competitive, and ultimately bring optimal value to their customers. There is no additional cost for Workday customers with an existing subscription. Appropriate planning for each release can help your organization get the most out of your Workday investment.
Review Adoption Roadmap
It is important to plan and prioritize new functionality and process changes alongside any existing optimization activities. If your organization already has a feature adoption roadmap or plan in place, evaluate the current priorities and timeline against the anticipated release changes. This way, your teams can better equip themselves to manage the necessary tasks associated with implementing the release updates.
Ways to Educate
All releases offer a multitude of opportunities for customers, partners and the like to learn what is part of the latest updates. Workday publishes release resources prior to and during the launch of every release so that customers can plan accordingly.
Consider accessing the following resources to better upskill your Workday release team:
- What’s New Report: Access the What’s New Report in your Workday tenant to search, filter and view what items are included in the latest release. The Report includes dates when the release change will be made available to preview or test. It is especially important to review soon to be retired items for your organization to plan accordingly.
- Workday Release Center: A centralized resource found on Workday Community containing important release information such as key dates, a comprehensive Feature Release Guidebook and more.
- Attend Workday Events: Participating in live or online events such as the annual Workday Rising conference or local Workday Customer Resource Group demo presentations provided by Workday, can benefit your awareness and understanding of what the latest release offers.
Manage the Change
Throughout the release update evaluation process, it is necessary to appoint a governance framework to ensure decisions are made in consideration of business needs, conflicting priorities, and potential downstream impacts. Your governance committee should consist of Change Leaders who are thinking strategically about the impact of every release decision on the people across your organization. Consider the following when creating your change management strategy:
- Governance: Appoint key decision makers, implementors, testers & change leaders to ensure the adoption plan & execution activities are beneficial, achievable, and sustainable for your organization.
- Test: Develop an end-to-end test plan to understand the impacts the new or retired functionality will have within your tenant.
- Train: Create a tailored training plan that details the topics, audiences, timelines & preferred methods to educate those impacted by the release adoption plan. Make sure to prioritize when and how the training is delivered so that it is timely with the implementation of the new features or functionality to achieve optimal results.
- Communicate: Remember to communicate necessary dates & details pertaining to the release changes and how they may uniquely impact stakeholder groups. Taking a proactive approach to communicating system changes will help to mitigate change fatigue from end users especially if the change results in a change in process, user interface, security, or access to reports in Workday.
Test & Assess the Impact
Upon each release, new functionality is enabled in your Workday sandbox preview environment. As part of your test plan, it is recommended to create test scenarios that can be used for each release that span the following: business processes, integrations, reports and high volume or repetitive transactions. Include in your test plan the testing of 1) Opt-In features 2) Retired Functionality 3) Automatically available optimization features.
The assigned testers should include Workday functional SMEs who are familiar with the current system configuration of individual modules. Workday leads within your organization who provide cross-functional oversight also play a critical role in the testing process to ensure system-wide impacts are considered. Throughout the testing process, consider the impact the change of the feature or functionality will have on those impacted as this is critical insight to provide to your organization’s Workday Change lead(s) to ensure they can plan for the best transition support.
Get Support
Looking for an experienced Workday advisor to guide your company through the release process? Fill out the Contact Us to chat with skilled Workday advisors on how to learn best practices when navigating this important milestone in your Workday journey.