I recently sat down with Workday’s newly minted Chief Customer Officer, Emily McEvilly and Webb Armentrout, VP of Global Services Alliances for an in-depth conversation on Workday’s services ecosystem. At the core of the Workday approach are an instrumentation rigor and a commitment to delivering 95% (or higher) customer satisfaction.
I recently wrote my decade-end perspective on the outsourcing market including my observation that it continues to be labor intensive (which reflects in staff turnover, inconsistent project quality, and high travel expenses) and that there has not been enough of a focus on continuous improvement and automation.
So it is with this lens, as former SI and current industry watcher, that I dove into my discussion with Workday. I also had a chance to attend a panel with three Workday partners, in addition to Workday executives, at the Rising event in Orlando this fall. The panel provided a good primer on the ecosystem with 35+ deployment partners.
My conversation with the Workday team covered a lot of ground, so I have sliced the blog into two parts. Part 1 today covers Workday certification of partners and automation both delivered by Workday and its partners. Part 2 will cover post-implementation services, how partners are helping grow the functional footprint, and how Workday keeps recruiting new partners.
Workday has invested heavily in the training and certification of partner staff and keeping those refreshed. This goes hand in hand with the company’s investment in the project quality assurance process, which Workday calls Delivery Assurance. Both aspects of this diligence are near and dear to McEvilly, who was previously senior vice president of services at Workday, responsible for ensuring operational excellence of the company’s services team.
“We want our customers—no matter where they are in the world and who manages their deployment—to have a common Workday experience,” said McEvilly “In order to accomplish this, Workday has developed a very rigorous process of initial certification, much more rigorous than in the legacy system days. There are different tracks, whether you're an HCM consultant or a financial consultant, and there are advanced tracks for additional SKUs that Workday offers.” According to McEvilly, this is not a one and done certification. After completing a training program, partners are then tested. This process repeats after Workday pushes a new feature release (every six months) with an additional set of required training and tests that go out to the partner ecosystem.
Partners have a specific timeline in which to complete their training and the testing, which Workday monitors closely. “We track the status of every (nearly 11,000) consultant in the ecosystem, and their status across the certification process. We also track how they're assigned to our customers, so we know exactly which consultants are on which customer project at any given time,” said McEvilly.
Workday captures a fair amount of detail across their partner ecosystem. Per McEvilly, Workday has dashboards that show, by firm, the tenure of their employees, the average number of certifications, coupled with the results from the delivery assurance process. “This allows us to see trends and quality on every single Workday deployment, both primed by Workday or by partner,” she said.
“Delivery Assurance drills down to a very granular view across project management, the functional workstreams whether that's payroll, HCM, or finance, and then the technical component around integrations.” From there, each Workday deployment progresses through various checkpoints and is subsequently scored red, yellow, or green. This rating system allows Workday to proactively flag any potential risks and make recommendations to the partner and the customer for how best to optimize their configurations. With all this data, Workday is better able to align resources and training to help partners and customers succeed. “Having this kind of insight allows us to engage in really candid and productive conversations with our partners,” said McEvilly. “We can approach a partner and say we see that you've had some quality issues with your deployments over the past six months. How can we help? Do you need additional training? Can we look at your methodology? Then we'll meet with them and review best practices.The end goal is to have these conversations and make corrections before a major issue arises for the customer.”
I had to ask Workday, how do your partners react to this much feedback? “As you might imagine, we sometimes have challenging conversations. But, ultimately, because we've got the data on certification, and delivery assurance, it's a fact-based discussion that lends itself to a much more productive conversation. Workday's 95% customer satisfaction is everybody's true north,” said Armentrout. The feedback is not one directional, “We ask our partners to provide us feedback as well, and often get very valuable insights on our programs, process and the products,” said McEvilly.
Tooling & Automation
SAP has invested quite a bit in updating its automation as customers move to S/4HANA. Plex has piloted a machine learning project where they looked at the systems configurations that customers set up. Clearly, that can be used down the line to automate that step in the field. I asked the Workday team about their automation and those at partners.
“Workday has invested in the quality of the preconfigured content that is the backbone to our implementations.” said McEvilly. “Workday Services has collaborated with customers and services partners to create and optimize best practices for implementing Workday, including variables such as company size, countries of operation, and industry, and artifacts such as reports, dashboards, and integrations.”
According to Workday’s tally, approximately 1,000 customers (as of 2019) used the company’s existing tooling to access preconfigured content for use in their tenants. “We are committed to ongoing enhancements to the tooling,” said McEvilly. Workday has pre-configurations around functional components as well as libraries of dashboards and analytics, and according to McEvilly, “will continue to invest as this will enable even more customers and implementation partners to easily what they need to accelerate their initial implementations, and their adoption of new features.”
Workday isn’t alone in investing time and energy in automation and tooling innovations. According to Workday some of the company’s smaller partners are on the cutting edge of automations particularly around medium enterprise. “We have a partner called TopBloc that created a file that takes the ADP Quitter file and automatically creates a Workday tenant from that. OneSource Virtual also has created a lot of innovation around the payroll process and reconciliation,” said McEvilly. “We’re seeing innovation come in different forms. It could be a parallel testing tool that reduces the risk for those large deployments or conversion tools to move large customers over from PeopleSoft,” she continued. “A lot of partners are innovating in the way they partner with tap into our software vendors so they can provide a more complete solution. It really runs the gamut.”
“Our focus drives toward a common methodology,” said Armentrout. “So, partners differentiate themselves through innovation. As the Workday Cloud Platform continues to mature, we will see even further innovation going forward.”
