At the 2024 HR Indaba, Telesure Investment Holdings and Glyde Consulting shared how their successful Workday Human Capital Management (HCM) implementation took shape.
Telesure and Glyde Consulting – a Workday implementation partner – shared key lessons with HR leaders from the Workday HCM deployment at Telesure. The biggest takeaway? Continuous change management is critical to success, as well as taking all stakeholders on the journey.
In the session entitled Lessons from the trenches: Preparing for your Workday Implementation and beyond, Carmen Grobler, senior project manager at Telesure, began by saying that the reason they opted for a Workday implementation was mostly due to their previous system having too many ‘nots’, including that it was not data-driven, it did not use real-time data, and it did not operate on a unified system.
“Workday worked for us because it did everything the previous system couldn’t do, it aligned well with our people and digitalisation strategies, it’s AI-driven, and it included ongoing support and training from the start,” she added.
According to Carmen, Workday assisted with the data migration, testing and the change management along the way. The likes of payroll, access leave, and learning and development were implemented early on, while recruitment came a bit later. Telesure is currently using the talent function for performance engagement, and they’ll be kicking off advanced people analytics and bursaries management soon.
Dirk Nieuwoudt, director at Glyde Consulting, highlighted that it’s important to ensure you have the right skills and capacity internally before any implementation. “For the people involved, you get a day job plus a project – if you do it right, it’ll transform the HR function, but if it’s done as an afterthought, it becomes challenging,” he cautioned.
He added that it’s critical to empower resources to understand what’s to come, ideally by prepping the team before the project starts. They’ll need to understand how the technology works and that it’s iterative – they’ll need to be comfortable with being uncomfortable.
“When you purchase Workday licences, you get allocated training credits; get your project leads to attend those,” he advised. “Capacity requirements and focus changes over time; it’s not a waterfall methodology and those allocated to the project must understand their responsibility and pay attention to details. Importantly, they need to be empowered to make decisions, and make sure you plan for adequate time for testing. It’s a great opportunity for knowledge transfer.”
Carmen echoed that it’s important for the leads to understand the implementation methodology early on and reiterated that paying attention to what the implementation partner advises is paramount.
“Any new digital implementation is like building a house – but it’s a house that those implementing the project will need to live in. Taking time to explain the methodology to the project team leads, and building the understanding of what they need to do throughout the execution of the project is key so that no one takes shortcuts, and that everyone pays attention to what the implementation partner tells you.”
According to Dirk, key implementation pitfalls (and the most stressful phases) usually happen during data migration and cut-over, which shouldn’t be about optimising.
“We ended up spending a lot of overtime capturing and recapturing data, and this is where a support partner like Workday added a lot of value,” added Carmen. “At Telesure, we realised we overcomplicated a lot of things – in particular the cut-over, validation and data migration.”
“When we joined Telesure on site, we were in their boardroom for a couple of weeks. It was so incredible how you can move forward if you have everyone in a room together. Along with that, it’s critical to start simply, because it’s easier to add complexity at a later stage,” Dirk concluded.
