Your Essential Change Management Roadmap for Workday's Feature Release

Tips for Shopping the Upcoming Release

Each Workday Release introduces hundreds of new features that can enhance your Workday tenant's user experience— when managed appropriately. The Release Center on Workday Community is a great place to start your research. Here, you can explore the upcoming release items and create a roadmap for your organization to continually enhance your experience. When "shopping" the Workday Release:

• Anticipate the road ahead by defining clear goals, creating a blueprint, and monitoring metrics.
• Cross-check for company-wide initiatives such as updates to your job catalog + restructured benefits offerings to ensure adoption is a reality. This is an opportunity to assess recent organizational initiatives and pair them with Workday enhancements via targeted communications (see Change Management Consideration #2 below for additional insights).
• Ensure that your Workday team has the necessary skill set to maintain these system enhancements moving forward. By assessing your overall operating model + identifying gaps prior to rolling out release items, your team will have adequate time to prepare via training and knowledge transfer.
• Understand the time required to configure and adopt these items. As you review the upcoming release items, determine which features will be automatically available and which will require effort and bandwidth from your Workday team to configure. Remember that not every item will require action immediately. In some instances, new opt-in features also detail when the features they are replacing will be deprecated and a suggested timeline for rollout. Note: The Release Center details when you can expect features to be available in preview and production. Use this to stay informed of any feature delays or retirements.
• Look through the lens of a Workday implementation partner! Sign up here to receive Invisors’ 2025R1 Release Notes in early March, where we provide a preview of some of our favorite, most impactful new features and their associated setup effort.
  
• Leverage the Adoption Planning Dashboard, which will be your best friend when it comes to tactically planning your approach to each release. Here, Workday shares reports on new features, templated tasks that you can leverage to determine + monitor the details of specific adoption items and links to additional resources to guide you.

Key Change Management Considerations

We recommend completing these activities during the release prep window while features are in preview. For 2025R1, this will take place between February 8 and March 17.

# 1 |   Conduct a change impact analysis to determine who will be impacted and the details of the features that are changing

• Begin by listing the top items changing in each workstream. Enter relevant details for each change including:
  -  A short description
  -  Whether the change will require updates to training materials
  -  The main group that will be impacted by the change

• Strategically organize your change impacts by how you plan to address them. We like to follow the 3 categories of “Prepare, Inform, and Reinforce” when developing a plan to manage change impacts, but each organization can use its own method to disposition the main changes. 

• Reflect on captured change impacts to determine key messages to include in communications. 
• Leverage your organization’s main communication channels as platforms for strategically timed distribution communications that prepare end users for changes.
• Consider tying release changes into pre-planned communications or larger organizational initiatives to make the messaging more meaningful. 

• Continue to leverage your current training material maintenance plan or use this as an opportunity to enhance it for future releases.
• Reflect on captured change impacts to determine key messages to include in training materials.
• Review your current support materials and determine if any screenshots or process documentation needs to be updated to reflect the new release items. 
• End-user training materials are not the only consideration. Ensure that your Workday team is prepared to maintain the new release items moving forward by updating back-office documentation, SOPs and your business-as-usual calendar as necessary. If you are looking to enhance the materials that support your back-office team, we can help! Contact Invisors for expert support.

• The Adoption Planning Dashboard will support you as you implement these changes. Adoption monitoring will be an ongoing activity as you continue to add new features and stay close to Workday Release updates. The Sign-On Analysis and Usage Metrics tabs on the dashboard provide additional insight into login metrics, usage trends, and specific transaction reporting by functional area.
• Leverage trends in end-user activity to help plan future adoption items.
• Invisors’ Change Management team has vetted and curated a list of the most useful adoption reports. Reach out for a copy of the list + additional insights!