Thursday 27 February 2014

Is Workday more complex that it appears? Or is the software not strong enough?

I've had a quiet week as my US HR colleagues are currently on an emergency trip to the HR Shared Service Center to try and sort out some Workday operational issues.  As you may recall, we had a soft launch in the US in December.  Now that everyone is back from their holidays and the first monthly payroll of January has run, it appears that post-implementation issues are larger than expected.  So a swat team of HR project members are planted in the SSC office to try and train them again and work through some issues.  A few key points:

1. It appears that some end-to-end processes really are not end to end.  So the processes work in the system, you can hire someone, transfer them, but at the end of the day, all of the dots are not connected on the process side, so they have orphaned tasks or recognizing that the WD process is a certain system data entry piece piece of a bigger functional process, such as a hire which requires non-system activity such as background checking.

2. Robustness of manager processes or lack of manager training?  My boss has been trying promote an employee using the manager self-service and it's required multiple HR people to help him to do this task.  Noticing online, there's not a lot of opportunity to provide dynamic help text, especially along the way.  You can enter help text into a transaction, but it's not smart enough to recognize what is wrong necessarily, which is the issue.  As well, the system is a little bit loosey goosey.  It's not as locked down as it should be for less knowledgeable or astute managers.

3. Change management/staffing.  In the sales cycle, it is insinuated that you can run the software with only trained monkeys, it's that easy.  Our SSC (who are bright data entry people, btw) are new to Workday as well as to the company.  The software is not so intrinsically easy that they can just pick it up and use it.  Further, similar to the above loosey goosey comment, it lets them do things online that they should not.  Not that WD is not an easy software, just that it's not so easy like looking at a web page, it's a software application like any other, so it requires training.  Further, with WD's updates, the pages change up to three times a year which does not help the people who are just learning it.

So I remain undecided whether the issue is:
  • Workday isn't as easy as it is suggested to be.
  • HR's training efforts were not good enough.
  • The software is too flexible and open, so you actually need highly talented people to utilize it.
  • Our implementation of the software is the issue, not the software itself.



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