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Driving excellence to ensure success: how to effectively prepare for your upcoming Workday releaseJune 2018

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Today’s speakers

Xan Daniels, Workday Test Management Lead

Chris Johnson, Workday Financial Management Lead

Debbie Burlando, Workday Payroll Lead

Jon Sherman, Workday Integrations Lead

Kirk Phariss, Workday Configuration Lead

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The testing yearly cycleFive week release preparation window to validate critical business functions

Jan

Feb

Mar

Apr

May

JunJul

Aug

Sep

Oct

Nov

Dec

YearlyLifecycle

Plan for release• Secure resources needed for testing. Ensure

that vendors and internal resources are aware of testing timeline.

• Finalize the testing plan and schedule.

• Build automated regression suite.

Test feature release• Run and review output from critical integrations before

beginning functional testing which may change the output, such as hires, terminations, transfers, etc.

• Validate your existing system data.

• Test your critical business processes to confirm the process and results are as expected.

• Run your critical custom reports to review for any changes.

Extend and optimize• Focus on planning and executing testing for optional

feature releases.

• Leverage automation regression suite as needed*.

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1

2

3

4

5

0DISCOVER

DEVELOP

DELIVER

• Plan• Conduct impact analysis • Confirm scope and effort

• Update configuration• Test• Remediate

• Release to production

Release testing simplified

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MANAGEMENTNeed POC – primary

to manage it all.

4Plan for testing

WorkaroundsCommunication

FIXES

RESOURCES SCOPESecurityMandatory updatesCore regressionIntegrationsReports

Cycle objectivesExit criteria

CYCLES

3

2Request SME’s

Align to automationEstablish routines

Testing documentationTenants

Data

Keep in mind that the Workday release is an iterative process. Week over week therelease will change. Be sure to stay connected to Workday Community for updates.

1

Discover test plan

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1

2

3

4

5

0Week 0:

• Review documentation and videos from Workday’s Announcing Workday Feature Release.

• Determine and schedule sandbox preview refresh dates.

• Identify resources that will be responsible for review and testing.

• Data mine to identify test scenarios.

• Review resource planning to ensure capacityduring the feature release window.

Discover: config prep

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2

3

4

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Discover: config prep

Week 1:

• Run the ‘What’s New in Workday’ report once it is available in the preview or production tenant.

• These features are provided in the sandbox preview tenant for testing purposes.

• Note that this feature list will likely be updated weekly with new features being added, updated or removed from the list.

• Drill down and define which mandatory features are currently in scope for their tenant and thereby are pertinent for testing purposes. Note certain features that Workday has marked as optional may actually be mandatory features if the customer has preceding configuration already in place tied to those optional features. (Alight could assist in this endeavor because it may take a consultant’s knowledge to piece together the missing links in configuration.)

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1

2

3

4

5

0

Discover: impact

Configurationrequired?

Changes to look

and feel?

Business process

impacts?

YES

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3

4

5

0

Discover: impact

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2

3

4

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0

Develop: testing

Week 2:

• Utilize the filtered report from Week 1 to assign each group from their internal designated teams/functional areas to define the tasks/business processes/reports/web services/functionalities to test.

• Refine test scenarios based upon the in-scope mandatory items that are relevant to their respective areas.

• Test these scenario’s in the sandbox tenant and compare those results to the results of those same tests within the preview tenant, determining if the expected results occurred based upon the updated feature in preview and if not, chronicle the errors.

• Testing should continue through to Week 3.

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1

2

3

4

5

0Week 3:

• Continue testing. Each team should meet to further define the items that passed or failed testing.

• These “failures” should be tested again and will likely take less time since the focus is now on the failures, which should be a reduced pool of issues.

• Determine if the continued presence of “failures” is a Workday bug or could otherwise be remedied by a workaround/further configuration that is absent, but necessary, to achieve success.

Develop: testing

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1

2

3

4

5

0Week 4:

• Complete testing and determine if failures are bugs or can otherwise be remedied through further configuration.

• Bugs should be reported to Workday and a plan should be developed to either have the additional configuration in place prior to release or have a team in place to make the change in production on the weekend following the version release so that the window between the version release in production and a necessary configuration change is a small one.

• If additional testing is required based upon additional features being added to the ‘What’s New’ report, this is a good opportunity to test for new items that materialize.

Develop: testing

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1

2

3

4

5

0Week 5:

• Continue to test for any new items that appear on the ‘What’s New’ report.

• Review the report to see if any features have been pulled back from the version release (perhaps some of those items related to the Workday bugs from testing in weeks 3 and 4).

• Confirm the plan for weekend support.

• On the Saturday following the version release, continue to review reports and process for any bugs in production.

• Monitor any service alerts that Workday sends out via email to be alerted to any issues and resolutions that are communicated during the version release.

Deliver

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Integrations

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DISCOVER DEVELOP DELIVER

• Review Workday release planning guidebook.

• Define and engageyour Workday release planning team.

• Coordinate your tenant refresh strategy during the upgrade window.

• Define your set of critical inbound and outbound integrations to be regression tested.

• If applicable, review testing automation setup for any adjustments thatare needed.

• Create a tracker/dashboard for your integration testing to capture success criteria and testing results.

• Review the feature announcements and flag major functional changes, especially payroll, for possible integration impacts.

• For in scope outbound integrations run the integration in Sandbox to get a baseline file to compare to.

• Ensure file delivery for in scope integrations are reviewed/update to prevent file delivery to a production end point.

• For inbound integration testing, identify what test files will be used; typically a copy of a production file.

• Begin your regression testing.

• Execute regression tests (continued).

• Review results and validate failures, errors and differences.

• Report new issues and retest resolved issues.

• Identify workarounds that will be needed for issues that will not be resolved by the release date.

• Regularly review the ‘What’s New’ report as features are added and removed up until the release date.

• Review your dashboard and ensure all tests are complete and with expected results.

• For any required changes where updates are needed ensure you have your migration plan defined.

• Prepare for the release weekend.

• Execute your migration plan for any needed changes or workaround.

• Review integration schedule to ensure no integrations are scheduled during the upgrade window.

• Post upgrade, review scheduled integration runs to ensure they are executing. Confirm files are being delivered. Review logs and errors for any anomalies.

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Payroll

• Test critical processes

⎻ Validate security access

⎻ Full payroll; run compare if possible between preview and another tenant refreshed withsame data

⎻ On-cycle/Off-cycle

⎻ Custom reports

⎻ EIBs

• Validate unique or sensitive processes

⎻ Populations – High-touch, international assignees, unions

⎻ Taxes – Ongoing multiple work jurisdictions, supplemental payments

⎻ Functionality–FLSA, retro

• Review processes impacted by new functionality

⎻ Mandatory features day 1

• Review/summarize test results and any open issues.

• Finalize communications.

• Plan for first payrolls after deployment weekend.

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DISCOVER DEVELOP DELIVER

• Critical processes, unique processes, impacted processes.

• Test scenarios/data mining.

• Review ‘Announcing and Feature Considerations’ and ‘What’s New’ report and videos.

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Thank you!For questions, please contact workday.solutions@alight.com.