Important Focus Areas For 2017

I genuinely enjoyed the opportunity to meet with so many customers at our Workday Rising customer conference in September, many of whom oversee your organization’s Workday deployments. In this Services Spotlight, I’ll share some of the highlights from the conference’s final keynote presentation, including feedback from our recent customer surveys and how the Workday Services team is following up to ensure we’re delivering the best experience possible for our customers.

We discussed two primary themes that came out of those surveys. First, customers believe we need to continue to build consulting expertise across the Workday Services ecosystem. Second, you and your teams asked us to put even more focus on ensuring a great deployment experience for your organizations. To address these areas, we are driving a number of initiatives that we believe will benefit all customers, ranging from those who are doing their initial deployments to our longtime customers who continue to deploy new products, features, and functions. These initiatives include:

Implementation Strategy and Enablement team (ISE). The purpose of this new team, established this year, is to drive deployment improvements across the entire ecosystem and to regularly monitor, educate, and support all partners. In the coming year, the ISE team will be delivering enhancements to our already robust certification process, our deployment methodology, and our implementation tooling.

More sample configurations and integrations. The ISE team is partnering with Workday’s Product Management, Product Development, Services, and Support teams to increase our catalog of sample application configurations and custom integrations in WDSetup, providing all of our certified consultants with a wide range of options for customers. We also plan to make WDSetup (including the samples catalog) available directly to customers.

Delivery assurance enhancements. In the coming year, we will deliver more automated tools to our services ecosystem that will systematically check your application configurations as part of our Delivery Assurance program. These additional tools will allow Delivery Assurance consultants to focus their time on your more strategic issues. As these tools mature, we expect to make them available directly to customers.

Expand cross-product knowledge. A little over a year ago, we released the Touch Points Kit (TPK), a toolkit that details cross-application considerations so that consultants can see what is impacting your deployments beyond their specific areas of product expertise (for example, it illustrates the upstream and downstream impacts that features have on one another across a broad set of functions). By using TPK, consultants can guide you to optimal configuration decisions. Given the high marks we’ve received from consultants using TPK, we are currently piloting the toolkit with a small group of customers. Our goal is to release it to all customers via our Workday professional accreditation program.

These are just some of the Services updates that were discussed at Rising, and your organization’s local Workday customer success manager will be a great resource for providing more details. We look forward to sharing more with you and your teams in the coming year.