Feb 26, 2024
The Importance of Planning for a Workday Release
Impact Advisors is excited about Workday’s upcoming 2024R1 new feature release. We’re looking forward to helping our clients uptake immediately available features and determine what optional functionality they may want to adopt now or in the future.
Release management should be carefully considered as part of your Workday roadmap. Updates always come twice a year so developing a repeatable process will pay dividends. However, not every organization has the resources in-house to develop a plan and execute it. As you think about the upcoming release, here are some questions to consider:
1) People
- Do you have leaders in each functional area who can support testing new features?
- Who will own testing cross-functional features, and who will the testers be?
- Who will determine what optional features the organization will adopt?
- Do you have an established Office of Change Management to address the people impacts of new functionality?
2) Budget
- Do you have the budget to create a detailed release management plan and operationalize it?
- By proving the value of enhancing your Workday environment, can you obtain more resources through the budgeting process at your organization?
3) Tools
- Do you have a tool for organizing your release management plan, testing, and managing the work effort?
- Do you need to meet documentation requirements for testing?
4) Time
- Are you starting late/close to the release, or do you have time to carefully plan sprints and align multiple stakeholders?
- Are there competing priorities for the organization and/or its resources?
Where to Begin
For organizations that may be limited on resources, we encourage focusing on immediately available functionality and tabling optional features for later. Regression testing of key processes in a preview environment will help identify where functionality differences may impact back office and end users and highlight what change management might need to be done to address those impacts. Impact Advisors has a toolset developed to support project and testing management to drive this process.
When addressing changes, consider how your population likes to receive information. Some stakeholders may need different types of training and communications. Impact Advisors has helped our clients with multiple mediums to convey change impacts, including updates to job aides, developing targeted communications, and executing virtual and in-person training.
Once you’ve developed a solid plan for this release, consider when and how to roll out additional, optional features. Optimization efforts will also require testing and change management, so it’s important to develop a realistic roadmap. We have seen a lot of success using Workday’s Adoption Planning functionality to carefully plan for upcoming releases and future enhancements. Impact Advisors can help you build your roadmap and use this tool effectively for your unique organizational goals.
At its core, release management requires coordination amongst desperate teams to facilitate planning and testing functionality updates. We’d like to help you set reasonable expectations for your team based on where you are in your Workday journey, and build excitement for enhancements and new features throughout your organization.
If you need help developing your overall roadmap, creating a Release Management strategy, or hands-on support specific to the upcoming release, we are here to help.