Written by Kate Fonville, Sales & Talent

Workday® Go-Live Cutover Readiness!

Going from a legacy system to Workday can be both exciting and stressful. You, your team, and the implementation partner’s team have worked long days, been to countless meetings, and are finally about to see the fruits of your labor. With all of the moving parts, vendors, stakeholders, etc., there are twelve key drivers that can completely derail go-live if they are overlooked. They drivers are:

Access Drivers
Payroll Drivers
Benefits Drivers
Time Tracking Drivers
Absence Drivers
Compensation Drivers
Configuration Drivers
Integration Drivers
Legacy System Drivers
Support Drivers
Change Drivers
Holiday Drivers

Within each of these categories, there are activities that need to be completed in order for your go-live to be successful.

Access Drivers
All accessible functionality for highest priority ESS Business Processes
All accessible functionality for remaining Business Processes
All User Guides are easily accessible
All teams have access to reports or a satisfactory workaround

Payroll Drivers
Parallel testing complete
Pay period start/end date for each pay group
First pay date
Confirm your period schedule is set up and accurate

Benefit Drivers
Review Benefit Plans and coverage types to ensure accuracy
Ensure your Plan Year Definition accurately reflects all benefit offerings
Review your Enrollment Event Rule to ensure Start/Waive and Coverage Rules are correct for each event and coverage types

Time Tracking Drivers
Period Schedule: Validate eligibility period start and end dates are correct
Time Entry Templates & Codes: review all Time Entry Templates and Time Entry Codes to ensure they are available to the correct group of workers and are functioning as expected
Holiday Calendars: review your calendars and associated eligibility rules as well as events for accuracy
Validations: review your critical or warning rules for time tracking to ensure the language and rule is working as expected

Absence Drivers
Ensure Time Off Plans are available for the intended population and accruals are functioning properly
Review Leave of Absence Types set up to ensure the full list is available to the intended population

Compensation Drivers
Review Compensation Packages to ensure grades structure and ranges are accurate
Validate pay data against the legacy system to ensure pay is accurately converted

Configuration Drivers
Core configuration completed and documented
Business Processes completed and documented
Module Help Text identified and configured
Worklets designed and configured
Dashboards for each module designed and configured

Integration Drivers
Identify integrations
Confirm integrations are scheduled to run at the right frequency, day, and time
Confirm that the correct launch parameters are in place for one time runs and for scheduled processes
Make sure integrations are owned by an Integration System User with enough security to run them
Make sure notifications are set up for all integrations in case they fail or complete with errors
Confirm that file delivery/retrieval steps point to the right endpoints
Confirm the correct file name format is set up for each integration
Monitor the first few runs and validate they are working as expected
Determine when integrations need to be triggered and which will affect go-live
Identify when the data is required by a down-stream system or vendor

Support Drivers
How are escalations being handled? Who are stakeholders reaching out to with problems? Some companies will set up a separate email/fax for all issues. HR might be the first level of support to ensure it’s not user error but having the structure in place to troubleshoot will make the user experience better.

Change Drivers
User Experience Testing Complete
Workday Soft Launch for HR
General Communication Strategy Checkpoints and Timelines

Legacy System Drivers
Extract Data
Store Legacy Data
Establish Access Policy for Legacy Data

Holiday Variables to Consider
Holidays can be considered PTO, Federal Holidays, weekends, etc. It is vital to make sure that there is coverage for employees on holidays. Every cut-over is going to have issues and knowing who will and will not be available is key to success when a problem arises – and they WILL.

For more information about cutover preparedness or to discuss how Syssero can help pre or post go-live please email info@syssero.com