Taking ownership of the Workday release schedule

Empower your Workday program to respond proactively to business challenges, including COVID-19 response and recovery.

By Nita Williams, Alice Rowland, Jodi Ballard-Beach, and Dana Hicks

Photo by Li Lin on Unsplash

A recent Gartner article outlined post-COVID-19 workforce trends that organizations may need to address. A few highlights from the list include: remote work, separation of critical skills and roles, and transition from designing for efficiency to designing for resilience. Developing practices that increase your organization’s ability to support your workforce in a way that allows them to proactively respond to business challenges will be critical during this period of economic renovation. Optimizing release management will help keep your Workday enhancement lists in sync with your organization’s COVID-19 response and recovery strategy.

Tools for optimization are already within reach and, with a few strategic moves, can be activated for immediate use. The following strategies are designed to help you effectively manage Workday’s release schedule. Workday’s approach to releases and updates requires a corresponding approach within your organization.

There are so many critical future-state decisions to be made during the initial Workday implementation, it is tempting to use your existing release management model, thinking it’s “good enough for now.” If you are coming from an on-premise tool or a part of a growing organization, this can be a critical error. A significant investment has been made in Workday; make sure you don’t set yourself up to fail. Do your future-self a favor and learn how to keep Workday working effectively and continuing to deliver ROIs. The nature of how your organization manages Workday releases must adapt. Here’s how.

Understanding Workday’s Release Schedule

Workday prides itself on being a tool that constantly evolves based on customer input. There are two primary methods Workday delivers releases:

1. Weekly Service Updates fix known issues and are used to deploy off-cycle enhancements such as capabilities required by new federal or state legislation (e.g., Affordable Care Act).
2. Twice a year releases introduce functionality that refines existing features and announces net new functionality and/or features. Because Workday is a software-as-a-service solution, all customers are automatically upgraded to the latest version each time this occurs.

Within these releases Workday presents functionality as mandatory or optional:

1. Mandatory features require each customer to review their current setup and ensure these changes are consistent with the established release timeline from Workday in preparation for the release.
2. Optional features are delivered “turned off.” These require customer action to be “turned on.” This allows customers to prioritize changes based on their internal capacity, timing, and unique business needs. It’s not uncommon for optional features to be delayed or not adopted at all if there’s no business case to support adoption.

Here are some of the tools Workday provides to support upgrades and releases:

• Workday Release Center, located in Workday Community, has release notes, videos, and forums
• Webinar Workgroups focus on best practices for planning, key dates, and communications for each release that can be integrated into your company’s adoption plan
• What’s New report outlines the new features and updated functionality, typically available about 8 weeks prior to the release go-live date
• Sandbox Preview Tenant is a delivered tenant for organizations to review and test any new and updated functionality. Twice a year at the beginning of the Release Preparation Window, it is auto-refreshed from a copy of Production taken on that Friday at 6:00 pm PT.

This type of schedule creates a need for ongoing review of your tenant configuration and deployment roadmap. The recommended strategy to do this is: Establish functions and processes to evaluate, align, and support the work related to new releases and to ensure critical business processes remain stable during release windows.

Key Support Model Functions and Roles

Now that the logistics are out of the way, we need to discuss who in your organization will take ownership of monitoring and managing these activities and plans. There are two key Workday support model functions: Release Management and Product Ownership.

• Release Management is focused on the Workday tenants and owns the organization’s methodology to manage Workday updates and releases. This function is charged with an array of technical responsibilities throughout the release adoption.
• Product Ownership serves as a critical conduit between the business needs and the technology workstreams. This function owns understanding the organization’s existing tech debt, desired business functionality, the broader demands of the enterprise and product planning portfolio, and ERP governance structure.

Working Together to Manage Workday Releases

Together, Release Managers and Product Owners form a dynamic duo that bridges the gap between strategy and execution. In addition, they collaborate on timing, function capability, and gaining critical user adoption. Here is an example of what it can look like in action:

• Product Owner evaluates new release offerings, using a critical eye to identify features that will benefit the organization and those with gaps that don’t yet meet the company’s business needs. This feedback is provided to the Release Manager to be tracked, re-evaluated, and submitted/voted as Brainstorm ideas to better inform backlog planning and understand tool capability.
• Release Manager owns evaluating Sandbox Preview to better determine if the new functions address known user concerns. How does your company gather feedback about their technology? Take into account the methods and frequency that your company provides opportunities for ongoing technology assessments and/or feedback.
• Together these roles have a shared responsibility of ensuring new functions will be adopted by users. To be successful, the individuals must have an understanding how various user populations interact with your Workday system. Product Ownership should be aware of the most-used processes and existing user grievances with current setup to help track resolutions. The significance of understanding the change impact becomes apparent when considering how to time a release to avoid interfering with high visibility enterprise-wide activities.

The time and effort saved in creating a cadence of release-readiness is critical to efficiently putting powerful new functions and features at the fingertips of your workforce.

Interested in how you can adopt the Product Owner and Release Manager roles in your organization? We’d love to help! workdaypartners@slalom.com

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