The Challenge

The Workday Sponsor was feeling the intense “Eye of Sauron” from the Senior Leadership, where the costs of the Workday implementation had exceeded the agreed financial budget and business was communicating that the new system of record was too complex, time consuming, not fit for their industry purpose and simply not delivering the agreed desired business outcomes against the business case.

To quote a frustrated line manager in the organization, “Workday adds to my work day”. 

Each week the situation was intensifying. Both managers and employees were not adopting Workday and the feedback to Senior Leadership was negative, with a push to go back to the old legacy system.

An attempt to go to market to recruit a Workday Product Lead with enough knowledge and experience to manage all the “Spinning Plates” with Workday and the business, failed due to a lack of suitable candidates with the right set of skills, even with an exuberant salary & benefits on offer.

The Customer Solution to the Problem

The Workday customer reached out directly to Lightwork Global, an Independent Workday Advisory company based in the UK, US and Australia with a dedicated, specialised, low-cost, high energy and fully focused team to quickly establish stability, priorities and control with both Workday and the business.

Quick Wins and Strategic Savings were established and made, aligning with the business users, giving confidence that Workday was the right product choice. The Senior Leadership, seeing progress and new data insights, began to feel the new business benefits, adopting Workday into other production systems and making it a vital go-to business tool.

Quote from the customer – Global Head of HR:

“Until Lightwork arrived, it felt like we were in a boat surrounded by sharks, without a paddle to move, our confidence was shot, the team feeling overwhelmed with a backlog of changes and without any energy or passion to drive Workday.”

Lightbulb Moment: With our team’s years of Workday experience we find many customers inside a Workday Desert or Wilderness. When speaking directly to the sponsor or owner of Workday, we promise to lift those dark clouds by giving you the tools and models to relieve stress levels, gain freedom to focus on your services and move towards the real reasons you purchased Workday in the first instance

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Key takeaways on how Lightwork worked with the Customer to their resolve problems:

• A low-cost commercial agreement of only 10 hours initially to work a problem with a “quick win” for the Business and to build trust with Lightwork services as a new partner.

• The customer team did not fully understand Workday Organisations and Positions, lacking that deep level of knowledge with the product. The Lightwork team ran Q&A sessions online globally for Workday knowledge transfer for both HR and Finance along with developing with the customer documented Job Aids to help them support the Business.

• Lightwork has a simple approach to customer problems:
  • Investigate
  • Review with customer solution
  • Approve/Deny/Park based upon business benefits
  • Deliver

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Lightbulb Moment: A key highlight came for the Finance team around building budgets into the positions for future job roles. The supervisory and positions history data was cleansed, driving an uplift in reporting using Workday and encouraged users to adopt Workday via a change & comms plan.

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The customer Workday support team had highlighted the Workflows in Workday were clunky, too many steps, “to do’s” that were not applicable and users abandoning the HR & Finance processes as too complex. 

The noise from the business was hitting fever pitch and the customer sponsor was under increased pressure to improve the situation.

Below are the success steps LightWork engaged that led to the biggest shift in the faith of Workday with the users.

• Deep Dive investigations into HCM/Finance Business Processes with the customer Workday support team, Show and Tell of the configuration
• Voice of the Customer – Workshop and Interview with leaders, mangers and employees across different locations/functions for feedback
• Presentation from Lightwork, outlining the issues, options, recommendations and costs associated to deliver change along with the business benefits and costs of the change with Lightwork & business savings – Approved
• Creation new Workflow Topology diagrams and Client User Documentation
• Configuration and re-vised the new workflows
• Testing across Unit, System and UAT with the customer
• Development the Business Change Impact Assessment and Communication Plan with the HR & Finance function
• Preparation the Training materials and Knowledge Transfer for the support teams
• Deployment of the change to the business

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At this point you’re probably asking yourself how much did it cost and how long did it take to make this change?

• 80 hours effort only from Lightwork and 8 weeks from start until finish. This would have been sooner, but the Voice of the Customer was a key focus point and took longer for the customer to gather the critical feedback than expected.

Lightbulb Moment: The Lightwork team are 6 months working with the customer via the function leaders and support teams, we have become that all important Workday Product Lead.

Lightbulb Moment: The costs of Lightwork resources across the digital changes required is less than a Workday HRIS Manager (FTE).

Lessons Learnt: With our country-based Workday Product Leads, the customer has support in real-time for Workday to fix issues, reduce risks, communicate change, challenge the status quo and be a part of the business fabric.

• A new Workday Roadmap of digital changes has been developed, approved with the customer.  7 new unique change packages that will drop new business outcomes and benefits are planned in the next 6 months.

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