As organizations consider their Workday support model, a common question is whether their end users (be they in HR or Finance) can support Workday as a part of their regular job. Technically, it is certainly possible for an end user to support Workday, but there are several considerations to think about.

First- ask, “Why they are asking this?” Is it because they think this would be a great experience for their team members? Or just to save money because they think it will help them avoid hiring a Workday support team?

Second, let’s be really clear: What do they mean by an end user?

There are end users who only use Workday to update their contact information and get their payroll stubs. 

Then, there are end users who use Workday as a primary part of their job in HR, payroll, expense tracking, etc. 

There are Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) who are end users and use Workday as a major part of their job, similar to the group above. But in the case of an SME, they are recognized as an expert in their area, both of internal processes and the area in general, such as Payroll, Benefits, etc. 

When someone asks about having an end user help support Workday, they typically think of a departmental SME. 

There are business analysts (BA)  and technical analysts (TA). The business analyst role may be departmental or within a software support team. The business analyst is typically great at working with those impacted by a process or project to gather the business requirements for a given project and document them. The technical analysts work with the business analysts to work out the technical solutions in the impacted systems. In some cases, the BA may also help determine solutions, especially with a configurable system like Workday. The departmental SME may also have BA responsibilities, but most likely not TA responsibilities.

As we think of an SME supporting Workday and doing their ‘day job’ in their departmental role, here are several things to consider:

• What is their actual time availability? 
  • Does this person have the capacity to take on the additional Workday support responsibilities? What changes must be made to their job description to create the space in their time to create this bandwidth?
  • In some weeks, there will be more Workday-related questions and/or activities to deal with than in other weeks. How flexible is their regular job responsibility to adjust to these weekly changes to support Workday well for their team? 
  • When it comes right down to it, what is most important? Their ‘day job’ or the Workday requests they are getting? If the person has to do both, it may put them into a ‘no win’ situation where they can’t get all the regular HR/Finance work done and keep up with the Workday requests.
  • Their availability may also change during the year (such as during audits/year-end closes for finance staff or Open Enrollment for benefits staff).
• Segregation of Duties (SOD) issues:
  • Should someone who can configure Workday also be doing transactions in Workday? This inherently brings the liability of someone adjusting a business process by removing an approval step to do something they shouldn’t, then adding the approval step back in. 
  • Be prepared to answer questions from internal or external auditors about this. Questions about this are now frequent during annual audits.
  • This applies whether the person works on an official Workday Support team or as an end user.
• Understanding of testing, change management, project management, etc.
  • I have seen situations where an end user quickly picked up technical things and was very good at their HR/FIN day job. Therefore, they were seen by the team as a great person to support Workday as part of their regular job. However, you need to assess whether this individual can test their changes thoroughly, understands how to communicate the upcoming rollout of those changes, and can work collaboratively with the core Workday support team, etc. 
  • Processes can be implemented to encourage working with the core Workday team as a part of the change review process to help mitigate some of these risks.
• Understanding the overall usage of Workday, having a big-picture perspective. 
  • If they aren’t normally in meetings with the rest of the Workday support team(s) and are aware of the bigger picture of how Workday is being used (and overall changes being considered), there is a risk that they make changes with negative downstream impacts. 
  • This can be compounded if the core Workday support team isn’t aware of the changes that this individual is making. Then, the core support team could get tickets about broken things, and it can take longer than necessary to resolve the issue due to the lack of communication about the changes being made (on both sides of that fence).
  • Without a solid overall system understanding, they also struggle to adequately test changes in such a way as to confirm that there weren’t any negative downstream impacts (other system users, integrations, data warehouses, etc.) from the change or to the other users in the system.
• Impacts budgeting:
  • When there are events like Workday Rising that they should participate in, whose budget will these costs come from?
  • When new training is available, whose budget should cover these costs?
• Longer-term career standpoint: At some point, these SMEs will likely say one of the following: 
  • I love the Workday work and want to do that full-time.
  • I want to stop doing the Workday support to focus on my ‘day job.’ 

After they gain solid Workday experience, someone on LinkedIn will likely reach out and offer them a full-time Workday role. This role would pay much more than you can justify paying them in their SME position, and you could lose them. 

This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t have end-user staff support Workday. It just means you must take steps to reduce the risks listed above. 

An example would be putting change review processes in place where they work with the core Workday team before making any changes in the Workday Production tenant (from an SOD standpoint as well as to confirm that there aren’t any downstream impacts to the change that the SME hasn’t thought of). 

Their job descriptions must also be adjusted to account for their new responsibilities. I know of customers who successfully have end-user staff to help support Workday. However, this arrangement carries extra risks and complications that must be monitored and managed.

From my experience and observations, this is not a replacement for having staff dedicated to full-time software support roles. It is a way to leverage the abilities of key SMEs to work with the Workday Support Team to better provide support to the company. 

So, whatever you do, go into it, eyes wide open, and not just to save some money.