Workday Enhancements
Incorporating enhancements into Workday is a critical activity for keeping our ERP system relevant and aligned to our current business needs and practices. This page provides an overview of how the ERP Services team manages and delivers enhancements.
What Constitutes an “Enhancement”
Enhancements add new features, functionality or changes to existing features and functionality that was implemented as intended. This may include adding additional fields to existing reports, adding a new Workday-delivered feature or product to our Workday environment, or adding a new step to an existing business process. For example, Workday has a product called Journeys, which may help in a number of areas and has not been implemented yet. Adding this to our instance of Workday is an enhancement.
Where Do Enhancements Originate
At this point, the list of enhancements originates from two sources:
- Scope not implemented during the project phase - A number of items could not be included in the Go-Live scope due to resources, timing or other business reasons. These items were placed on the project backlog and are now on the enhancement tracker.
- Items discovered after Go-Live - For now, this list accounts for a smaller percentage of the existing enhancements being tracked. Most of these items are changes to existing features and functionality which have been discovered through using Workday and realizing some changes would be helpful. Other changes may have come from awareness of available features and functionality that is not yet implemented, for instance, new features listed in the bi-annual release.
How Many Enhancements Are Being Tracked
The chart below shows how many active enhancements are being tracked by the ERP Services team. For more information on what an active enhancement is, see below.
The enhancement database includes the following categories in terms of an implementation cycle:
- New - These enhancements will not yet show up as in the above chart. These have been submitted but not yet reviewed by ERP Services. A review is required to make sure the entry is not a duplicate, not something that is already implemented, and is otherwise a valid request.
- Pending review - These are represented in the bar chart above and represent enhancements that have passed the first review mentioned above, but have not been fully analyzed for effort and other considerations.
- Approved, awaiting work - These are represented in the bar chart above. They have effort estimates and other considerations defined and are effectively “on-deck” for implementation
- In-progress - These are represented in the bar chart above. They are enhancements whose implementation work is underway.
- Complete - These are not represented in the bar chart above. These enhancements have been deployed to production.
- Cancelled- These are not represented in the bar chart above. These enhancements have been canceled and will not be implemented.
Who Can Submit Enhancement Requests
Most enhancements will probably be submitted by a central business unit (UHR, Finance, Procurement, etc.) as those groups support end users and will be in a good position to see opportunities for improvements. Other likely sources for enhancement requests are people who have roles like CBO, DBO, HR Partner, HR Analyst, and similar roles in the Finance and Procurement space because these communities will develop deep, relevant knowledge about Workday and will be able to identify opportunities for improvement. Ultimately, any user can submit an enhancement request just by clicking on the button below.
How Are Enhancements Prioritized
Currently the prioritization process includes the following components:
- Understanding the business drivers of the enhancement so those that have high business impacts get proper consideration
- Sizing enhancements to ensure the ones that can be delivered quickly get early consideration
- Assessing overall complexity of the enhancements to include which teams from WES, Central Business Units, and other user communities need to be involved. Those requiring broader involvement need more scheduling and coordination to deliver. This is an important consideration in selecting the delivery timing
- Selecting a target delivery quarter
- Incorporate enhancement delivery into regular ERP Services activities. It is important to note that production emergencies and bi-annual release work will generally have a higher priority than work on enhancements. Generally speaking, ServiceNow ticket resolution will also be a higher priority but there is more flexibility in whether WES focuses on enhancements or tickets
Currently ERP Services is fully managing most of the prioritization process due to being in the very early stages of being in production with Workday. As ERP leads are able, they are getting input from the business units on prioritization. Soon, ERP Services will be looking to formalize this process up to and including executive oversight to help with the inevitable challenges of prioritizing what is likely to be a long list of important enhancements.
Who Can See The List of Enhancements
The buttons below point to all the open enhancements.