The Project Team this week returned its attention to achieving a milestone in the iNtegrate 2 Workday implementation: Preparation for Phase 1 of Unit Testing. This important step begins for the Human Capital Management (HCM) portion of the Team Monday (Jan. 11), and for Finance Team Members on Jan. 19.
In anticipation of testing, Testing and Training Coordinator Jo Ann Porter this week hosted a webinar attended by more than 80 providing insight into how testing of our newly configured system and validated data will unfold in the next several weeks.
What many organizations call the Quality Assurance or production environments, Workday calls the “Tenant.” The Tenant is the online arena in which the testing of our data and the Business Processes we’ve designed to govern it will take place. Our Business Processes are the sequence of one or more tasks we complete to accomplish a business objective, such as hiring an employee, approving a leave request or paying an invoice.
Workday implementations are divided into five phases beginning with Prototype 0, and concluding with the “gold master,” which is the configuration and data deployed at “go live.” P1 is the prototype we will test beginning next week through the end of February.
Prototype 1 Unit Testing
Phase 1 of P1 Unit Testing will take place Jan. 11 through Feb. 4. P1 Unit Testing will involve testing the components, or “units,” of our newly configured system. The first phase will include all Designees and select Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) from our campuses. Phase II will take place Feb. 8-25 and include all Designees, SMEs and key Power Users.
With the exception of the two holiday weeks (Martin Luther King Day on Jan. 18 and Presidents’ Day on Feb. 15), Testing will take place Mondays through Thursdays each week in both SCS North in Reno and SCS South in Las Vegas. (It will occur Tuesdays through Fridays during the holiday weeks). On the Fridays when Testing isn’t being conducted, the Project Team and implementation consultant Sierra-Cedar, Inc. (SCI) will address issues identified during the week and make any refinements needed for the coming week.
All test participants will use Test Scenarios to govern the testing. Test Scenarios are pre-defined scripts developed by the Project Team and Designees that are designed to thoroughly test our new business processes and generate feedback on what’s working well and what needs adjustment. HCM Team Members completed their Test Scenarios this week, and Finance Team Members expect to complete theirs next week. A total of more than 2,500 test scenarios are being developed.
We anticipate three cycles of testing before the Project’s October “go-live”:
- Unit Testing (Jan. 11-Feb. 25): Testing of our system’s “units,” within the P1 Tenant. It will involve the Project Team, Designees, SMEs and SCI consultants.
- System/End-to-End Testing (Spring-Early Summer): Conducted in the P2 tenant, it will test our Business Processes from beginning to end, and confirm that notifications, approvals, accounting, etc., occur correctly. It also will involve the Project Team, Designees, SMEs and SCI.
- User Acceptance Testing (UAT) (Mid-Summer-Early Fall): Conducted in the P3 Tenant, UAT will involve a subset of end-to-end test scenarios executed by a broad cross-section of campus employees and the Project Team.
Recent activities by the two primary groups that compose the Project Team are detailed below.
HCM
- Assigned Test Scenarios to testers who will begin P1 Unit Testing Monday.
- Continued Integration work with vendors that provide our employee benefits, such as health insurance, life and disability insurance and retirement products. This work will ensure that the data in our vendors’ systems properly maps to and interacts with our Workday configuration and data.
- Continued with data validation and resolving data issues to ensure that existing and new data will load smoothly into P2.
- Worked on guidelines to educate campuses on how to best load new data coming into their systems so that it will load properly into P2 and subsequent prototype(s).
FINANCE
Because data files received from our campuses was in widely different formats maintained in our institutions’ often-different information systems, the Project Team spent several months converting and then working with our institutions and SCI to review, correct and validate the converted files. Part of that conversion included creation of “Crosswalks,” which are files and programs that ensure that our legacy data maps or links correctly to the corresponding values in our new Workday configuration.
Finance continued to finalize its conversions, including for theFinancial Data Model (FDM). The FDM is the multi-dimensional structure of Workday accounting and financial reporting. It includes what we today refer to as the “Chart of Accounts.”
- Continued to finalize data that will be loaded into the FDM Crosswalk. We’ll also use this Crosswalk to convert other legacy data, such as purchase orders, assets, and accounting journals from our legacy systems into Workday.
- Continued to develop the initial set of Test Scenarios.
- Continued gathering location information across all of our institutions and putting it into a consistent format for loading into Workday.
Upcoming Events
- Jan. 11-14
- HCM: Unit Testing, Phase 1
- Finance: Test Scenario Finalization
- Jan. 19-22, Jan. 25-28, Feb. 1-4: Unit Testing, Phase 1, HCM and Finance
- Feb. 8-11, Feb. 16-19, Feb. 22-25: Unit Testing, Phase 2, HCM and Finance