When implementing Workday Student, you will work closely with an implementation partner to guide you through the process. Implementation partners are invaluable sources of up-to-date expertise and extensive experience. But don't forget that while they know Workday, your implementation partner does not know you or your institution. You are the expert on you.

When implementing any aspect of Workday Student, I highly recommend that you have an institution project plan and you don't rely solely on the one from the implementation partner.

Here's why:

1) The implementation partner project plan focuses on tasks the implementation partner must complete. Not the institution. In reality, the institution's task list is much longer and more detailed. Don't lose sight of this.

For this reason, many schools choose to invite Legato to join the team to ensure the institution has a clear plan and completes all of its required tasks. You don't want to lose track of these.

2) These project plans are usually over 500 lines long and is broad, lacking needed details. It will give you false impressions of the work to be done.

3) The Workday Student methodology follows a waterfall project plan approach (Plan, Architect & Configure, Test, Deploy) and the project plans try to categorize everything into one of these stages. However, this is misleading. Tasks do not fit cleanly into each stage. For example, there are multiple "moves to production" or steps towards deployment. Additionally, testing does not wait for the Testing stage. Instead, it begins during the Architect and Configure stage.

All these intricacies are not clearly communicated to schools in the implementation plan. It is helpful having an advocate, like Legato, on your side as you move through this process with the implementation partners.

4) Because Workday Student projects are so complicated, the project plans mention only broad items that you have to track elsewhere (e.g. tenant builds). In reality, there are usually ten or more projects happening simultaneously that require coordination. It's hard to track dates and tasks in two places resulting in the project plan falling out of sync. It is recommended that institutions develop their own project management system to organize these tasks and ensure they are completed. The implementation partners will do not this for you.