Preparing for Your Workday Implementation

Implementing @Workday is a catalyst for digital transformation within higher education organizations. There are a number of preemptive actions your institution can take to prepare for this multi-year endeavor in advance of Workday project kickoff. Preparing your leadership team as early as possible to facilitate this complex endeavor is recommended - ideally, prior to project kickoff. Once Plan Stage begins, this marathon may feel more like a daily sprint!

#Alchemy has partnered with many institutions to deploy their Workday products and is excited to share some pre-planning tips to help your institution best prepare for a successful Workday project kickoff and implementation!? ?

Develop your institution's vision and goals for the Workday implementation. A cohesive and aligned strategic vision for the implementation of Workday is critical to effectively promoting the value of the solution and it how it will transform your institution’s digital enterprise.

Establish your Sponsor Coalition. ?Establishing a collaborative Sponsor Coalition as early as possible gives the Project Sponsor an inclusive leadership support network to assist them in navigating and executing the complex project pre-planning activities. ??

Prepare your Project Resources Plan. By proactively identifying internal resources to serve on the project team, and in key project leadership roles, you will understand where you may need to hire additional resources to support the project or serve as operational backfill.

Establish a project governance team and a decision-making process.? Looking critically at how decisions are made within your institution and how they align with the recommended Workday Project governance model will determine if your team resources are sufficiently empowered to manage their project decision-making expectations.

Bringing the Project Implementation Heat Map and Lifecycle to Life. Reviewing the project heat map allows leadership to understand the required effort for project team resources and timing expectations for your Workday project implementation. Reviewing this in parallel with other planned strategic initiatives allows your leadership team to develop mitigation plans for competing priorities. Be sure to also map out planned breaks, holidays and peak business activities times to increase awareness and plan support.

Document critical business processes and security access needs for impacted departments. Find out what your people really need to access in order to do their jobs.? These exercises can outline your system functionality needs and reveal opportunities to improve future process design decisions.

Begin preparing institutional data. Conducting a proactive data clean-up process of data points within your legacy system and other third-party systems provides for a smoother data integration process later on.

Start breaking down silos from the beginning. It’s easy to have tunnel vision in the thick of implementation. Establish a practice of cross-functional dialogue and solutioning in pre-plan stage and reinforce that culture to support collaborative work throughout the project implementation into sustainment.

Get Oriented on Workday. Once your Workday contract is signed, customers can access Workday Community and enroll in Workday Learning opportunities. We recommend that key project roles take “Workday Core Concepts” as early as possible.

Want to learn more? We will be offering a Workday Preparedness & Readiness workshop on May 8, 2025, at 1:00-2:00 pm ET.