Workday® Student Implementation Experience Versus Lived Experience

Up until about 18 months ago, I had only worked on the implementation side of Workday® Student. I had been a Workday® customer, an implementation partner consultant, and an independent consultant all during the implementation phase. 

I recently talked with another independent consultant who had many years of experience in Workday® Student, but also had not supported a school live until the last year. The consultant commented how much they learned supporting a live Workday® Student instance.

Impact of Live Transactional Data

Seeing the downstream impacts of decisions is critical. Once you have transactional data it changes how you build reports and use the configuration. I wish more people on the implementation side had this lived experience because it makes you realize things often recommended in an implementation don't work in real life.

You get into nuances such as when to choose the course registration record vs. course registration business object for a report (TIP: The course registration one has all activity such as grade changes, versus course registration has more "final" ones, but there are nuances to that as well).

This more narrow perspective is common in the Workday® Student consulting world as it's still a pretty new product. Many of the very talented people who implemented at their institution continue to work there and manage the product they put so much time into making happen. Many of the very talented implementation partner consultants continue to do more implementations. There is a division of perspectives.

So what can you do to make sure you have the best advice based on what works when you're live:

1) Talk to other schools live on Workday® Student after implementation

You don't know what you don't know. Higher education institutions are often willing to share amazing best practices and offer valuable insight into what works for them and what doesn't work.

2) Work with experienced Workday® Student independent consultants

The thing I see here as compared to post-production support tickets is that you need time for people to get to know your institution. They need to learn your set-up, your configurations, your team, and the culture of your institution.

Seek out a dedicated person(s) to support your school using the deep knowledge they have about Workday® Student. These are the people that are both whizzes at Workday® Student, but also understand your team and institution.

Final Thoughts on Your Implementation

Choose the right support based on the problem at hand.

It's still great to have access to that post-production support at an implementation partner for technical fixes.

But the common day-to-day problems or those where you need to dig into reports are best served by independent consultants just a phone call away.

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