3 Ways to Support a Workday Launch After You Go Live

 

08.16.2022 | Managed Services

 

If you’re approaching your Workday implementation launch date, there’s probably a running checklist in your head of all the steps you’ve completed. You and your Workday partner have identified project requirements, migrated your data, user-tested the platform, and created thorough documentation.

Business stakeholders can rapidly build and deploy customized features that address key requirements However, whether you’re implementing Financial Management, Human Capital Management, or any module in between, the challenges don’t end once your cloud application is live. Much like NASA needs mission control, you need ongoing support to monitor your Workday tools and jump into action when problems with data, configuration, or security arise.

The question is how should that post go-live support be structured? In our experience, there are three ways organizations can approach ongoing support: in-house teams, occasional consultants, or Workday application management services.

Hiring or Upskilling Full-Time Employees

Does the complexity of your implementation require constant oversight and support? Are there multiple modules in use across your organization? Do you have integrations such as payroll that are time critical? You might want to consider hiring one or more experienced Workday specialists to handle the wide spectrum of ongoing support tasks. While added headcount does impose a significant cost to the organization, if you can make the business case with leadership, then you’ll have someone who can handle most Workday challenges that come your way.

The benefits are multiform:

• Deep internal expertise to address issues without outside help
• Tickets can be answered more rapidly
• Knowledge of your business and technology can be retained in-house

Despite those perks, some organizations see a challenge in this model: it is sometimes cost-prohibitive in nature. Compensation, benefits, bonuses, and other employee-related expenses can be difficult for any organization to justify for a specialty skill, even if it’s a cornerstone of your business.

Another option is to take existing employees and upskill them on Workday. We provide this through what we call “Enablement,” which involves training your team on the fundamentals of Workday, providing knowledge transfer that guides them through common challenges, and covering the cyclical activities that arise for your various departments. Once the process is complete, your team should be mostly autonomous when resolving Workday issues, updates, and other demands.

Work with Consultants

In general, the major advantage of working with consultants is their flexibility. Whether your IT budget is restricted or your Workday support needs are temporary, a consultant offers workforce resolutions for a defined challenge in a fixed timeframe. Since the turnaround usually needs to be quick, organizations typically work with Workday staffing agencies, which have an established talent pool, to supply them with experienced professionals on-demand.

When are Workday consultants better than a team? Here are a few examples:

• Break-fix support for when you need resolutions for Workday implementation failures
• New integration builds with new third-party apps
• Temporary coverage after employee attrition

In all the above instances, consultants offer companies access to expertise on an ad hoc basis. This allows them to scale up or down according to their needs and financial concerns. The major challenges of engaging consultants are that this model can take some time to scale up to your business and that you are at the mercy of the available talent pool on the market. As a result, sometimes there’s not an immediate response to your urgent needs.

Another method organizations use to access exceptional consultants is by offshoring their long-term support needs to a low-cost location like India. When a business chooses a high-quality offshore partner, they can achieve the same caliber of support at a lower price point, while often expanding the responsiveness of coverage across time zones. International corporations or growing enterprises depend on this level of support to operate at full efficiency. The result is deep Workday expertise at a reasonable cost that can be deployed long-term, creating knowledge retention of both your business and this cornerstone cloud platform.

Shared Services Model

What if your need for go-live support is more frequent and often urgent but not constant? There’s a perfect middle ground: the shared application management services (AMS) model. This allows you to have a centralized pool of non-dedicated resources to provide support when and where it’s needed. Your in-house people can call upon a variety of Workday specialists to handle the range of different modules or industry specific tools at your disposal.

How do you know if shared AMS is right for you? This type of arrangement can deliver on all the above challenges as well as these others:

• Ongoing service and maintenance requests
• New feature and release management
• Updated configurations as your systems evolve
• Cyclical activities (benefits enrollment, year-end processes, etc.)

Typically, most companies use 100 to 300 hours of contracted time annually, working either with their implementation partner or one with the resources and reputation to deliver enterprise-level results. However, these arrangements are scalable to your needs.

Even though Workday cloud-based platforms are designed to be user-friendly and engaging, your organization will benefit from the responsiveness of a team prepared to resolve issues and questions with data, configuration, and security know-how.

How to Determine Your Needs

The above options are just a few of the reasons to consider the different types of Workday go-live support. Much like the sophisticated cloud-based platforms themselves, they work best when you’ve given comprehensive thought to all the associated factors. Be sure that you ask and answer these questions before you make your decision:

• How many resources do you need?
• What Workday and IT skill sets does your organization require?
• What does your organizational structure look like?
• Which model best fits ongoing support? Occasional enhancements? New projects?

Once you do, you’ll be able to take advantage of the full efficiency, productivity, and scalability that Workday has to offer—without worrying about any little issue or question that develops.

Are you still wondering how your post go-live support and Workday launch can work in practice? See how the Agilysis team helped a client succeed with post-implementation support.

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Ready to maximize your Workday investment and extend your Workday platform? Agilysis is your Workday solutions expert. Get in touch with us today to get started.