Your Questions Answered: Optimizing Your Workday Investment

Whether you have just selected Workday, are about to go live, or are a long-time customer, it is mission critical to develop and continually refine a long-term optimization strategy to maximize your organization’s investment in Workday. 

When should we secure a post-production partner? 

Planning is crucial to deployment success and choosing the right post-production partner early in the process can guide your Workday transformation. The transition period following Workday go-live can bring a lot of uncertainty. No matter how prepared you think your team will be to take on the care and feeding of the system, your perspective will quickly shift from being knee deep in go-live activities to the areas where you will require additional support when the “training wheels” come off. For example, you may suddenly have team members leave your organization upon project completion or underestimate support needs in certain business areas. Developing a well-thought-out service delivery model and back-up contingency plan for such events is crucial to ensuring your project success.

Our most successful customers are the ones who begin thinking about their support model and approach before and throughout the implementation process, not just towards the end. It is critical to understand the key considerations and the menu of support options available. You should also seek tailored recommendations based on criteria such as your organization’s size and scope of your project, outstanding implementation items, team experience, and resource capacity, to name a few. The right post-production support partner can expertly guide you through these conversations and considerations early and often, which will help to eliminate any unnecessary fear, uncertainty, and doubt about your organization’s ongoing support needs post go-live.

Who should we partner with to optimize Workday?

A certified application management services (AMS) partner can help you develop an optimization strategy for your Workday solution. Leveraging a certified partner like Avaap can be beneficial because our consultants have experience across the transformation journey, from enterprise solution selection and understanding the goals your team can achieve with Workday, through deployment and understanding the emotional side of change, which all feed into leveraging best practice optimization plans for your organization.

So, what else should you consider? Important, but often overlooked, is ensuring your partner will be invested in your organization’s long-term success with the commitment to helping your team become self-sufficient. Some partners will focus more on upselling new products or encourage an unnecessary reliance on some services versus an investment in ongoing training and knowledge transfer. The right trusted partner will look to work themselves out of a job and be able to demonstrate and provide references regarding how they will ensure continuous enablement of your team.

Additionally, be sure to inquire if the support team will be comprised of onshore or offshore resources (and how that is distributed), if they are part of a pooled versus dedicated model, the number and blend of certifications, consultant retention statistics, breadth, and depth of support offerings, as well as flexibility of their contracting arrangement . How work is distributed can affect the success of the entire project. You’ll also want to think about managing the cultural differences effectively between onshore and offshore resources to get the best results.

What else can an AMS support partner help us with?

AMS offers more than short-term help desk/ticketing. Support providers offer a wide range of comprehensive services to increase the value and impact of your Workday investment. Through ongoing adoption and optimization, to scaling your deployed solution to meet changing business needs, these services include:

• Ongoing Support: A certified AMS partner will provide responsive in-tenant troubleshooting support to help your organization navigate the day-to-day use of your Workday system. The partner should have Workday certified resources available to address questions across all functional and technical modules, on a planned or as-needed basis. Your partner should also be available to support ongoing knowledge transfer and to teach your team how to best use your Workday system according to best practice recommendations.
• Enhancement Projects: Following the stabilization period post go-live, many organizations elect to add Workday modules or new functionality as the years progress from the initial implementation. An experienced optimization partner can provide hands-on configuration and/or advisory support for your organization's rolling adoption of Workday by providing roadmap, phase X, and small project deployment services.
• Workday Update and Release Management: Workday releases major updates twice a year. All Workday customers receive the same update at the same time and being prepared is critical. Many organizations engage their support partner several months prior to each release for guidance on how to successfully navigate the release cycle and prepare for new features being released. This uptake guidance should be tailored to your organization’s unique configuration and needs, ideally in a 1:1 or small group session.
• Staffing Enablement: As part of contingency planning, it is imperative that you have a trusted partner relationship where you can leverage full-time or part-time Workday certified or client-side project-based resources for both short-term and long-term engagements. These resources can be embedded as part of your team for day-to-day support and operational efficiency and work directly with end users or internal business partners.
• Ongoing Optimization – Workday is a continually evolving solution and as your business needs change, your organization should create a roadmap for’ ongoing optimization of Workday. Your support partner will provide Workday Certified resources to help with tenant diagnostics, existing configuration assessments, business process reviews, and integration health checks to ensure you are taking full advantage of the Workday solution in a way that makes sense for your organization as it evolves over time.
• Advisory Services – A support provider should have expert resources available to co-develop a broader strategy to optimize your organization’s Workday investment including post-production support governance and road mapping services, user adoption, training, and communication planning/execution.
• Testing – One of the most overlooked areas of need is testing. Your support partner should have resources available to help your team with test strategy, building of high-level testing scenarios, and regression testing execution.

Why Avaap AMS?

Avaap has provided Workday optimization services since 2015 and is known for its high-touch support experience. Our team of highly experienced, onshore, certified resources are passionate about Workday and helping our customers get the greatest value from the Workday investment. Our resources have worked in implementation and support, bringing a holistic understanding of the entire Workday journey and well-rounded background and experience, resulting in a more tailored approach to achieving the results you want.

Each Avaap Workday AMS team is comprised of dedicated, named resources who know your organization and learn your business, so you don’t have to re-educate a new resource on how your business operates each time you need support. As a result of Avaap’s positive, employee-focused culture and steady growth, our consultant retention is one of the highest in the Workday ecosystem. This means your organization will enjoy working with a team of stable, experienced resources resulting in improved project and support outcomes.

Partnering with Avaap, your organization won’t have to navigate the bureaucracy, red tape, or the cookie cutter approaches of a larger organization and will experience a more personalized support experience. 
The success of any ERP transformation, especially Workday, is that the outcomes are more about the people than the technology. By using available resources or leveraging a partner experienced in application management services for Workday, your organization can get the maximum benefit from its investment and set your team up for future success.