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.
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.
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.
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:
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.