Top 3 Workday Implementation Issues in Higher Education (and How to Avoid Them)

Workday implementations in higher education fail, or seriously stumble, for reasons that have very little to do with the software itself. The most common issues are organizational: change management gaps, data conversion approached as a technical exercise rather than a business mapping lift, and misaligned SI relationships. This post breaks down the three issues we see most often and what institutions can do to get ahead of them.

Key Takeaways

Introduction

Workday is a powerful platform. When a higher education institution makes the decision to move to Workday, they are usually making it for the right reasons: aging infrastructure, pressure to modernize, a desire for better reporting and a more unified system across HR, finance, and student records.

But the go-live is only the beginning of the story. Many institutions arrive at launch day exhausted, over budget, or carrying unresolved issues into production. Some never fully recover.

After working with institutions across the country on complex ERP transformations, we have seen the same patterns repeat. The good news is that most of these issues are predictable. And predictable problems can be prevented.

Here are the three most common Workday implementation issues in higher education and how high-performing teams avoid them.

1. Workday Change Management: Why Institutions Underestimate the Lift

Of all the Workday implementation issues we encounter, this one is the most consistent and the most underestimated. Change management is often treated as a communications plan and a training schedule. It is much more than that.

Workday changes how people do their jobs at a fundamental level. Business processes that took place across spreadsheets, email chains, and shadow systems are now structured workflows in a single platform. Staff who have been doing things a certain way for 10 or 15 years are being asked to do them differently, on a new timeline, with a new approval chain.

In higher education, this challenge is compounded by shared governance. Faculty and administrative leaders often have competing priorities. Departments operate with a high degree of autonomy. Building consensus around new processes takes longer than it does in a corporate environment, and the implementation timeline rarely accounts for that reality.

One of the most important expectations institutions can set, and should set early, is that go-live is not the finish line. Cutover is the beginning. Workday will continue to evolve after launch through configuration updates, new feature releases, and process refinements driven by real-world use. Organizations that communicate this clearly before the project even begins build a workforce that is prepared and engaged for an ongoing journey rather than a one-time event.

What high-performing teams do differently:

• Appoint dedicated change management leads with authority, not just project managers with a change management workstream bolted on
• Engage department heads and end users early in the process design phase, before decisions are locked
• Build feedback loops into the project so that concerns surface before go-live, not during it
• Treat change as ongoing, not a one-time event before cutover

2. Workday Data Conversion: It’s a Business Problem, Not a Technical One

A Workday implementation is only as clean as the data you bring into it. For most institutions, that means confronting years of accumulated inconsistencies in their legacy data. Whether it is a Banner-to-Workday migration or a move from another SIS, those inconsistencies tend to look the same: duplicate records, incomplete fields, non-standard coding, and data that was accurate once but has never been maintained.

The most common mistake is not just when institutions start cleaning data, it is how they think about data conversion in the first place. Many project teams approach it with a predominantly technical mindset: run the scripts, flip the switch, and the data moves from Banner to Workday. In practice, data conversion is far more of a business interpretation and mapping lift than it is a technical one. The scripting is the last step. The hard work is everything that comes before it.

Before any data can be converted, someone has to make a series of business decisions: What does this field in Banner actually mean for us? How has it been used? How does it map to the equivalent field in Workday, and if there is no direct equivalent, how do we handle it? Those are not questions IT can answer in isolation. They require the functional staff and department-level stakeholders who actually understand how the data has been entered, how it has been used for reporting, and how it needs to be translated into the new system.

Dirty data at go-live is, more often than not, a symptom of an insufficient business mapping effort up front, not a technical failure.

What high-performing teams do differently:

• Assign data stewardship responsibilities at the department level, to the functional staff who know the data, not exclusively to IT
• Begin data readiness work at project kickoff, not in the months before go-live
• Build crosswalk documentation that explicitly defines how legacy data maps to the new system, with functional sign-off at each decision point
• Run multiple data loads during the testing phase so that business interpretation issues surface with time to resolve them

3. Misalignment with the Systems Integrator (Workday Implementation Partner)

Most Workday implementations are led by a large systems integrator (SI), also referred to as a Workday implementation partner. Most institutions enter those relationships with some version of the same assumption: the SI will handle it. That assumption creates problems.

A Workday implementation partner brings deep technical knowledge of the platform. They know how to configure it, they have a proven implementation methodology, and they have guided many institutions through the process. What they cannot bring is knowledge of the institution’s business. Every institution has its own way of operating, its own history, its own business processes, and organizational context. Only the institution’s own people can bring that to the table. The implementation partner is there to guide the technical execution. The institution has to own the business decisions.

When those two teams are not working in sync, the implementation suffers. Without genuine collaboration and active participation from the institution’s counterparts, the SI will start making decisions in silos. Configuration choices get made based on default assumptions rather than how the institution actually works. The result at go-live is a system that reflects the implementation partner’s standard approach more than it reflects the institution’s actual needs.

Making this partnership work requires the institution to show up as a real counterpart throughout the engagement. That means having the right people available, with enough bandwidth to engage meaningfully. When institutional teams are stretched thin across the day-to-day demands of running a campus and the demands of an active implementation, something gives. Ensuring the institution has the staff and resources to fully participate is one of the most important things leadership can do before the project even begins.

What high-performing teams do differently:

• Staff an internal project team with enough bandwidth to be real partners, not just meeting attendees
• Assign clear decision-making authority so the SI has an empowered counterpart who can say yes or no in real time
• Engage independent advisory support to represent the institution’s interests throughout the engagement, providing a separate set of eyes and ears that can advocate for what is right for the institution at every stage of the project. Learn more how David Kent Consulting provides Workday consulting services for higher education
• Bring in staff augmentation or consulting support to backfill gaps in the institution’s team, whether in IT, functional areas, or project management, so the institution can hold up its end of the partnership and stay meaningfully engaged throughout

Why Workday Implementations Succeed or Fail in Higher Education

Look at the issues above and a pattern emerges. None of them are fundamentally about technology. They are about organizational readiness, decision-making, and the gap between how an implementation is planned and how an institution actually operates. This is why institutions that treat a Workday implementation as a technology project tend to struggle, and institutions that treat it as an organizational transformation project tend to succeed.

Working with an independent consulting partner alongside your SI is one of the most effective ways to close that gap. Not to duplicate what the SI does, but to represent your institution’s interests throughout the engagement, bridge the distance between the project team and institutional leadership, and make sure that what gets built actually reflects how you work. For guidance on evaluating advisory partners, read our guide to choosing the right higher education consulting firm.

If you are heading into a Workday implementation and want to talk through where you are and what you might be walking into, we would be glad to have that conversation.