Spring Cleaning Your Workday Environment
It’s not just our homes that could use a little tidying up. Our Workday environments, filled with countless integrations, fields, security groups, and reports, often become cluttered over time, making it difficult to navigate efficiently. This Spring, let's delve into the importance of establishing clear naming conventions for these cross-functional elements and explore some practical tips to streamline your workspace.
Why Naming Conventions Matter
At first glance, it might seem trivial to fuss over naming conventions, but clarity in nomenclature can significantly enhance productivity and collaboration within your organization.
Here's why:
Enhanced Understanding: Clear naming conventions provide instant insight into the purpose and function of an object. For instance, a well-named calculated field like "CF_LRV_ManagerID_Worker" instantly communicates its function to be a look-up related value from the worker business object for manager ID. It also communicates that this is not a Workday delivered field, so when selecting it for a report or condition rule, careful consideration should be given.
These are the same Calculated Fields, they perfrom the same function, however one is more clear on its function.
The field that references the ESI (Extract Single Instance), tells you there is more to this field than just pay group periods monthly. This field is really performing a sorting function based on a condition rule to return the first pay group summary for the latest end period.
2. Efficient Reuse and Grooming: With standardized naming conventions, commonly used fields and rules become readily identifiable and can be easily reused across different reports and processes. It also allows quick identification of unused objects for removal/grooming. These in conjunction promote consistency and streamline workflows across an organization.
3. Improved Security Management: Properly named security groups help ensure that access rights are appropriately assigned and monitored. By prefacing security group names with identifiers like "ISSG" for integration system security groups, administrators can quickly identify and rectify any security breaches. “ISSG_ADP_Outbound_Stuido” Is an outbound studio Integration to ADP, and if you see this security group on initiated benefit elections, you can quickly tell that the security group may be in the wrong place.
4. Clarity in Reporting: Named customer reports with clear indications of their purpose and data sources enable users to quickly locate and utilize the right reports for their needs. Prefacing customer reports with "CR" ensures easy identification and categorization especially when some reports are used in integrations and others are not.
Spring Cleaning Tips
Now that we understand the importance of naming conventions, let's explore some practical steps to clean your Workday environment:
1. Audit Existing Elements: Utilize reports within Workday to conduct audits of your integrations, fields, security groups, and reports. For example, generate a report to review all integration systems, ensuring they adhere to the established naming convention and contain relevant information such as direction, usage, and integration type. (CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD A FEW REPORTS TO GET YOU STARTED)
Note when you go through the cleanup of your integration systems, Integration system users, and Integration System Security Groups, we suggest you use the same numbering convention across the three objects.
Example:
ISU_INT0450_ADP
ISSG_INT0450_ADP
INT0450_ADP_Outbound
Reminder some ISUs or ISSG may not have integration systems because they are WWS (Workday Webservices) or RAAS (Report As A Service) Endpoints. These should still adhere to naming conventions when possible, though re-naming will likely cause problems for the WWS/RAAS calls.
2. Establish Consistent Naming Conventions: Define clear and consistent naming conventions for each type of object within your Workday environment. Ensure these conventions are well-documented and easily accessible to all team members. Remember even the things that are no longer relevant should have a convention. In many Workday tenants, you may see “zdnu” used. This helps flag when something is no longer being used, and audits should be run to see if it should be removed (when possible). (Download table)
3. Implement Changes Gradually: Implementing naming conventions across your entire Workday environment may seem daunting. Instead, prioritize areas that require immediate attention and gradually extend the changes to other elements over time.
4. Educate and Train Users: Provide training sessions or documentation to educate users on the importance of naming conventions and how to adhere to them effectively. Encourage collaboration and feedback to refine naming conventions based on user experiences.
5. Regular Maintenance: Make spring cleaning a recurring practice by scheduling periodic reviews and updates to naming conventions. This ensures that your Workday environment remains organized and optimized for efficiency.
By investing time and effort into establishing clear naming conventions, you can transform your Workday environment into a well-organized and efficient space that fosters collaboration and productivity. So, this spring, let's embrace the spirit of renewal and embark on the journey to declutter and optimize our workday experience. Your future self – and your colleagues – will thank you for it.
Having spent some time cleaning up a tenant for the first time, I would use the linked reports to accurately pull all data to be reviewed. You may have to use different reports to validate all the Security, Calculated Fields, and Report data for review. Take your time, involve your team, and ask team members about anything unusual. You will find your ability to work within the tenant is instantly more efficient once conventions become standard practice across users. Happy Spring Cleaning!
Contact us at info@stormlooptech.com to learn more.
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Written by: Conor McCullough
Follow Conor on Linkedin here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/conor-mccullough-3b0667207/