For your business to reap the benefits of Workday®, you need the right people working alongside your implementation partner. But what does it actually mean to have “the right people”?
Here’s a handy overview of what a great Workday® team looks like.
Project manager
This person needs all the usual project management skills but with a few extras up their sleeves.
For a start, the benefit of them having previous Workday® project before is a key differentiator. As I’ve said in past articles, Workday® is very different from other solutions. You need prior experience to know how an implementation should progress and what the pitfalls are at each stage.
Workday® PMs also need to have strong stakeholder management expertise. They need the credibility and technical know-how to champion what you need, when you need it – so you stay on track and on budget.
Integration lead
The integration lead supports your PM but with a special focus on (you guessed it) integrations.
Workday® is so transformative because it integrates with your disparate systems. Get the integration wrong and you face major issues using the solution (and therefore getting maximum value).
Again, the integration lead should have Workday® experience. They should be highly technical but be able to translate highly technical concepts into layman’s terms. Business leaders don’t care what code is being used to achieve the desired outcome: they care about what you’re trying to achieve and how it will improve the business. The best integration leads have an innate ability to speak both to business people and technical people peer to peer, and empower them all.
Architect or functional lead
This is someone with solution architecture experience as well as expertise in HCM / Finance and at least one other Workday® module. They need to be able to make high-level design choices about how the whole system works, understand the touch-points between modules & understand downstream impacts of the decisions being made.
Like your project manager and integration lead, your architect should have Workday® experience – but it only needs to be with managing a particular workstream.
Architects should also be willing to travel (if, for example, the implementation is happening across different teams in different countries), be organised and have good interpersonal and stakeholder management skills.
Data lead and test manager
Workday® involves large volumes of sensitive and confidential data, so your team needs a data lead to ensure you’re compliant and secure at all times.
Your test manager comes in later, coordinating all required testing to help ensure a seamless roll-out across your organisation. Typically with Workday® customers we see Jira being used as their preferred defect management tool so expertise in the area of helping you maximise the testing efforts by having someone proficient in the software is key; in addition to this, experience with developing the Workday® testing scenarios will ensure you maximise the testing phases for your implementation.
These roles should be filled by technical people with (that’s right) some Workday® experience.
Programme manager
If you have a large-scale implementation, you should consider having a programme manager, too. This is an internal person with strong management skills, in depth understanding of the importance that change management plays on a programme transformation and who the project manager supports / reports to.
They don’t typically need Workday® or technical expertise – they’re there to oversee things from an organisational perspective to maintain that vital link between business objectives and the solution implementation.
Ongoing support staff
You should keep the same Workday® team in place throughout the implementation process. But after go-live, you will probably want to supplement that team with additional support roles based upon your post production support model.
These could be recruited externally or trained from existing permanent staff involved in the project. But it’s a vital component for ongoing Workday® success.
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In this latest article we have looked at what a Workday® team should look like, however this can always be open to debate and change depending on the variables of a project. Focus on WD specialises in helping you plan for the resources you need now and tomorrow. For an in depth conversation about what you and your project may need, book a call with one of our Workday® Consultants as soon as possible.
