Workday Case Study: Building the Foundation for Workday Success at a Financial Institution

The Situation

A US-based financial institution with approximately 750 employees completed their Workday implementation three years prior, but wasn't getting the value they expected from their investment.

Transactions were getting completed, payroll processed, and teams were using the system; however, cross-functional alignment had never fully developed. IT owned the system, with heavy involvement from HR. Finance and Procurement were engaged but operating largely in parallel. Teams had different expectations about what Workday should deliver and who was responsible for making it work. Decision-making was unclear. Meetings had too many stakeholders and not enough resolution. A culture of reactivity had taken hold, with teams managing crises rather than driving improvement.

The tension was most visible in the expectations across teams. IT owned the system but was staffed for traditional IT work—infrastructure, project management, and vendor coordination. Workday requires something different: functional knowledge that sits closer to HR and Finance than to infrastructure management. AMS support carried the heavy lift with break-fixes and system questions; however, tickets were incomplete or missing context due to a lack of internal Workday expertise. The gap wasn't anyone's fault, but without a shared framework for working through it, frustration was building on all sides.

Leadership recognized that getting more value from Workday required more than configuration changes or new features. They needed alignment across HR, Finance, Procurement, and IT. They needed governance. They needed a path forward that everyone could commit to.

The organization had invested millions in their Workday implementation. The lack of clarity and governance across their support teams—HR, IT, Finance, Procurement—was undermining their ability to deliver on their employee retention and Workday ROI goals. The system that was supposed to enable employee experience was instead creating pain for the teams responsible for supporting it.

The Underlying Cause

Workday had been live long enough that the initial implementation energy had faded, but the cross-functional operating model required to sustain and improve the system had never been established. Ownership was ambiguous. Prioritization was reactive. Teams didn't have a shared understanding of Workday's capabilities, which led to incomplete ticket submissions, underutilized features, and manual workarounds that persisted because no one had time to address them properly.

This pattern is common in organizations that complete a Workday implementation but don't invest in the governance and alignment work that enables long-term value. The system runs, but it doesn't improve. Teams operate in silos. And the longer alignment is deferred, the harder it becomes to establish.

The Engagement

We were brought in as a Workday consulting partner for a 90-day engagement to deliver a governance strategy and framework, support model recommendation, stakeholder analysis and assessment, RACI model, and an 18-month roadmap integrated across HR, Finance, and Procurement. We also developed onsite workshops to align leadership on governance, support model, and intake and demand management.

Stakeholder analysis and relationship building. We conducted structured interviews with employees and leaders across departments to understand each team's needs, pain points, and expectations. These interviews ensured the work stayed connected to the organization's broader goals around turnover and employee experience, and finance’s need for improved reporting and data quality. We also met with business users to understand the end-user experience. These conversations built trust and surfaced what wasn't being said in cross-functional meetings.

The analysis uncovered themes that cut across departments:

• Too many stakeholders on decision-making calls, with unclear meeting objectives and outcomes

• No formal governance structure to clarify responsibilities and decision rights

• Senior leadership needed to more visibly execute authority and empower delegates

• A culture of reactivity and crisis management rather than proactive prioritization

• Backlog oversight gaps and inconsistent follow-up on business requests

• Low adoption of new features and delayed implementation of fixes and enhancements

• Report usability issues causing manual workarounds, with no clear framework for which reports served which purposes

• Limited understanding of Workday's capabilities across the organization, leading to incomplete or incorrect ticket submissions

• A need for additional functional expertise within the business to identify requirements and drive continuous improvement

Cross-functional workshops. We designed multi-day workshops that brought HR, Finance, Procurement, and IT together. The goal was to create shared understanding, surface disagreements constructively, and build alignment on how the system should be governed and supported. These sessions laid the groundwork for a unified approach rather than parallel efforts.

Governance framework and support model. Using insights from the interviews and workshops, we developed a governance framework that established clear accountability and decision-making processes. We also designed a support model recommendation that addressed the core ownership question: did the organization need a singular Workday owner or module-specific owners? We provided options with tradeoffs, giving leadership the information they needed to make the right decision for their environment and to put forward the necessary budget request and justification. The support model also included an intake and demand management process and RACI model to clarify who owned what across functions.

18-month roadmap. We created a roadmap that integrated priorities across HR, Finance, and Procurement, aligned with corporate strategic objectives. The roadmap included enhancements, integrations, recurring activities, and audit and cleanup work, sequenced based on internal priorities. We recommended optimization and module reviews, along with expanded use of self-service and compensation capabilities. We identified where external support would be needed based on existing resource gaps. We also provided a sprint planning framework and annual planning framework to support ongoing execution.

Executive engagement on resistance. To manage resistance uncovered during the stakeholder interviews, we maintained clear communication channels with the executive leadership team. We summarized feedback, defined where leadership support was needed to drive change, and articulated why it mattered for their teams. This ongoing dialogue helped leadership understand and prepare to address the cultural barriers to execution.

The Results

The engagement delivered clarity and a framework for moving forward—not executed transformation. That distinction matters, and it was the right outcome for where the organization was.

The stakeholder analysis revealed that the people-related issues were deeper than initially understood. Proceeding directly to roadmap execution without addressing alignment, governance, and cultural dynamics would have risked wasting further investment on initiatives that couldn't stick. The organization had already invested millions into Workday. Spending more on enhancements and optimization before resolving the structural barriers would have repeated the pattern of investment without return. The organization needed time to strengthen internal dynamics before they could enact the roadmap in good faith.

What the engagement produced:

• Governance framework establishing accountability and decision-making processes across HR, Finance, Procurement, and IT

• Support model recommendation with options and budget justification to support leadership decision-making

• Intake and demand management process to reduce reactive firefighting and establish clear request channels

• RACI model clarifying ownership across functions

• Integrated roadmap with sprint planning and annual planning frameworks

• Stakeholder assessment documenting cross-functional themes and barriers

• Executive alignment on the people-related work required before roadmap execution

Observable outcomes during the engagement:

• IT leadership began holding regular internal meetings to address specific findings before project close

• Executive team within HR reported increased discussions at the leadership level about cross-functional alignment

• Leadership gained visibility into barriers that had been felt but not articulated or documented

• The intake and demand management process gave support teams a framework to push back on reactive requests and establish clearer prioritization—reducing the crisis management culture that had been burning out key staff

The CIO indicated the work gave them context they didn't have—visibility into cross-functional dynamics and system challenges that they needed to lead effectively.

The CPO said the engagement helped document what HR had expected from Workday while giving them the information they needed to move forward internally as a team and determine how they would engage IT going forward.

What This Engagement Reflects

Not every engagement ends with transformation. Some organizations need clarity before they can act. They need to understand what's actually blocking progress before they can invest wisely in fixing it. This engagement revealed that the largest opportunities for Workday value weren't technical—they were structural and relational.

The roadmap we built was sound. But executing it without first addressing governance gaps, ownership ambiguity, and cross-functional tension would have produced the same frustration the organization had already experienced: investment without return.

Our role was to surface what wasn't being said, document it clearly, and give leadership the framework and information they needed to move forward intentionally. The result was an organization that understood its real challenges and had a path forward—one they could pursue when the foundational work was complete.

Abnormal Logic provides Workday consulting services that help organizations bring clarity and stability to complex Workday environments. If you're struggling to get value from your Workday investment and suspect the barriers aren't purely technical, we can help you understand what's really in the way.

Reach out to us at info@abnormallogic.com to start the conversation.