Workday Extend 101
An Overview by the Stormloop Integrations Team
Workday Extend, formerly known as the Workday Cloud Platform, is a platform that provides opportunities for customization and consolidation across your Workday tenant for a more catered Workday experience.
Extend does NOT come with your Workday subscription out of the box. The platform is an individual SKU and warrants a pricing discussion with your Workday Customer Success Manager.
When to explore investing in Workday Extend:
Here are some questions or scenarios that should warrant a conversation around Workday Extend:
1- Your end users are concerned that some critical tasks they perform in Workday are tedious, either containing too many pages and clicks, or requiring them to enter data they have to look up somewhere else.
2- Your end users are constantly switching between multiple systems to perform tasks in Workday.
3- Certain tasks or approvals are occurring outside of Workday, possibly through email or a shared spreadsheet. Maybe that data is being entered into Workday by an admin user after the fact, or it could even be entirely foreign to your current configuration.
4- You currently utilize a Workday business process that covers 90% of your requirements, but need to leverage an external system to complete the process. You are looking for a seamless user experience that simply enhances a standard Workday process so that it is customized specifically for your organization.
5- You would like to plug a Workday application into another tool (such as an intranet page) to bypass the need for users to log into Workday for tasks that require their input.
What does an Extend deployment look like? A typical project will explore the below phases:
Although this phase list is similar to your typical application rollout, we slate more time for #1 & #2 to ensure your Extend application will not have unintended consequences to various functional areas and is truly a win for your business as a whole. The below phases follow our project architecture and recommended approach. Other teams may follow slightly different approaches that are equally as successful depending on your business needs.
1- Requirement gathering - We recommend meetings with key stakeholders to identify the intention behind the application including the who, what, when, where, why this application is needed. Although this may seem basic, the importance of team alignment cannot be stressed enough. Workday Extend requires significant investment both financially and developmentally, so there is no time to be wasted reverting back on requirements due to miscommunications early in the project. Please keep your development team looped into these conversations to confirm technical feasibility of the app, as well.
2- Design - The functional and technical teams finalize and document the requirements, testing plan, project schedule, and overall project architecture. Basic proof-of-concept development is acceptable but should not extend beyond this to avoid wasted time. Core development activities should begin following the completion and acceptance of the final design document. The team should also decide how development and testing will be tracked and shared throughout the project schedule.
3- Prototype & Unit Testing - The application is developed in an implementation environment and unit tested against basic testing scenarios by the development team. The team is in constant contact with business owners to ensure all progress is relevant and the original requirement is still intact. We recommend occasional working sessions to demonstrate progress and confirm intention with the application’s progress.
4- User Acceptance Testing - This is the “plug it in” moment we’ve been waiting for. The application should run as it will in Production to confirm the development progress meets the original requirements. End users should be brought in to run through test scenarios, and any changes should be regression tested to confirm no other impacts to the application. We do not recommend moving to the next stage until you have buy in and sign off from all players included in Step #1, Requirement Gathering.
5- Deployment & Hypercare - The application should again be tested in Sandbox as a confirmation that the Production environment remains stable based on the new functionality. You’ve likely been developing in an Implementation tenant, so there’s no doubt been changes to Production since the project started. Once this smoke testing is complete, promote the app to production, migrate and configure any supporting objects. Watch the process extremely closely for the first several days to confirm stability. At this point, any inquiries or issues should be tested in sandbox and receive team signoff before deploying to Production.
Now…you’re live! The application can enter the Workday support process you use for other Workday items like internal ticketing or the Stormloop Support Center.
Overall, we’re excited about Workday Extend because the tool really allows you to own and customize your Workday environment. Nearly anything that you have wished Workday could do, or do better, could be (and should be) explored using Workday Extend.
If you’re curious about possible Extend applications, our team has listed some recent applications we’ve built and/or supported throughout the ecosystem and a brief overview of the application’s intention:
1- Streamlined Requisition Process - Combining Extend, Prism, and Inventory, we were able to create a online shopping like experience for financial users and even non-technical users to be able to create requisitions for their store through a custom interface complete with regional pricing, multiple levels of keyword searches, item images, and automatic financial coding. Orders could be saved and picked up again later or copied over from previous orders. Once the end user submitted their order, it was sent to a financial user where costing fields were revealed and overridden, if necessary. In the end, these orders were completed and turned into standard requisitions/purchase orders. This new process took thousands of back and forth emails with spreadsheet attachments and brought them into Workday where it all looked and felt like out of the box Workday and orders were able to be saved and reported on after the fact.
2- Dynamic Project Creation - Using Extend, we have completely overhauled the Create Project task and business process. Rather than requiring all fields to be complete upon submission by the end user, this new custom interface lets the “Requestor” fill out a few simple fields then submit it on to a second stage “Reviewer”. The Reviewer was able to see everything the Requestor entered but also had more technical finance-related fields to fill out based on where the final project would end up. This request was then passed on to a 3rd, executive user where even more fields were revealed and final decisions could be made. At the end of all 3 users, there was enough data to create a standard project in Workday. This segmented submission process can be applied to almost any task/business process in Workday and can allow less technical users to have more engagement with the platform.
3- Workday has a strong organizational structure with supervisory organizations, cost centers, company, etc., but the idea of a non-hierarchical team can be difficult to scale within a given tenant. We’ve seen several inquiries around creating and managing teams that aren’t supervisory organizations. Our team members were also a part of a hack-a-thon team who developed a better UI for committee memberships. We basically leveraged the delivered committee objects and APIs but created a consolidated UI for requesting, maintaining, removing workers from “teams” or committees. We built an orchestration within the app that would add them to the appropriate channels/teams and send them a welcome message introducing them to the channel/team with some notes on membership, expectation, and action items. Extend can bring the idea of a team to one UI page in Workday to reduce tenant maintenance and business process configuration and security.
4- Extend is common for secure compensation data & processes. In this area, we’ve built an Annual Compensation Review Decision Guide app. Our client wanted to move from a rating to a non-rating system. The process consists of a formal annual evaluation that includes merit and annual incentive awards. In the past, the client relied on a custom external application with a decision guide to determine awards. They were lacking reporting on usage & leadership visibility, and an integration was required to feed over demographic data. The Extend application keeps everything in Workday and leverages native worker data with a series of questions to help guide managers to proposals for merit + incentive increases. This data is then pulled into the compensation grid as a reference point for the worker. The recommended amounts can be included in standard reporting and also viewed via compensation review reporting.
Have Extend and loving it? Get an app idea while sipping your morning coffee? Just want to talk about how cool this platform has become thanks to Extend? Send us a note! We love connecting on these exciting topics and sharing knowledge across the ecosystem.
Contact us at info@stormlooptech.com to learn more.
Follow Stormloop here: https://www.linkedin.com/company/stormloop-technologies-llc
Written by: Aaron Nichols & Peter Rutgers
Follow Aaron here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aaron-nichols-iub/
Follow Peter here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/peter-rutgers-673392219/