1. Planning
Every spring and fall, Workday Release Features are delivered, allowing you the opportunity to take advantage of many new features and functionality. It’s a good idea to develop a project plan, establish timelines and start securing additional resources that may be needed to support the feature releases in areas like user acceptance testing. This is essential if the updates occur during business-critical periods such as annual enrollment, performance or merit cycles. Don’t get caught underestimating the overall project management time and coordination efforts to review release notes, complete impact analysis on enhancements, properly test updates, and execute a thorough change management and communication plan.
Make sure your subject matter experts (SMEs) are actively involved in the release management team. Trust us, they’re important to the overall success. They’re responsible for thoroughly reviewing mandatory features (within their areas of expertise) to identify potential impact. Their participation in regression testing is a good way to avoid downstream impacts too.
Without the proper planning, resources and tools available to support this twice a year effort, the task at times can seem daunting and often times organizations just do the bear minimum, failing to take advantage of the newest optional features and functionality or properly regression testing their current set up. This can leave you at risk for falling behind in uptaking features or introducing issues into your tenant.