Project Meetings
The Design or Alignment sessions are a series of workshops for each workstream led by the functional consultant to capture customer requirements.
Attendees:
All project managers
Functional leads and SMEs
Meeting Purpose:
To demonstrate functionality, align on future state, and capture customer requirements
Timing:
Architect & Configure stage
Change Management Value-Add
Why This Matters for Change Management:
During these sessions, the project team reviews Workday's "Standard Best Practice" processes and determines where the organization can adopt these standards and where configuration or process redesign is required.
As decisions are made (e.g., new security roles, approval flows, self‑service scope), immediately tag what they mean for communications, training, and adoption measures. Use the outcomes to convert design decisions into concrete change management next steps and metrics.
Questions to Ask Yourself
Expand each section below:
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How do people feel about the current process?
Who will experience the biggest shift in how they work?
What might people be anxious about losing in the new system?
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What workarounds have people created?
Why is a process changing? (Compliance, efficiency, or system limitation?)
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Are they using a new word for an old concept? (e.g., "Supervisory Organizations" vs. "Departments").
What is the specific change? (e.g., "Managers now initiate job changes instead of HR")
Considerations
The name, length, size, and number of these sessions may vary depending on the implementation methodology being used.
Your Way/Launch Flex Methodology
Includes design and playback sessions
Dive deeper into design decision questions introduced during discovery sessions to gather a more detailed understanding of customer requirements
May have multiple iterations (worksets) for each workstream
Launch Methodology
Includes alignment sessions
A series of sessions introducing the customer to the foundation tenant
These aren’t process design sessions, but rather are used to gather configuration specifications.
Usually only one session per workstream
Save 100 hours of meetings
Are you drowning in design sessions on your Workday implementation?
Let's talk about the math that can quickly burn you out:
→ 15+ workstreams (Finance, HR, Recruiting, Time Tracking...)
→ 6-hour design sessions for each
→ 100+ hours of meetings in a single project phase
You know you can't miss these sessions—they're where the real insights live. But you also can't clone yourself. Learn how you can get the benefit without the burden by using AI tools.
Video (7:02)
AI tools can act as your "second brain" for the project, capturing the context, decisions, and concerns from every session—without you sitting through every minute.
AI Prompts (Example)
A ready-to-use set of AI prompt templates designed specifically for change management and project workshops. These prompts help you instantly summarize alignment sessions, extract change impacts, capture risks and decisions, and generate comms and training inputs—without starting from a blank page.
Key Points
1. Turn Workshop Outputs into Early Change Impacts
During the sessions, translate each “As‑Is vs. Workday To‑Be” decision into concrete people/process impacts by role, location, and volume of users. Capture these in a simple change‑impact log (what is changing, for whom, what is the magnitude, what might be a risk). Use these categories:
Process Impacts: Changes in the steps required to complete a task, such as moving from a paper-based approval to a digital workflow.
Role Impacts: Changes in the responsibilities of a specific persona, such as an HR Partner taking on a more strategic role while managers take on more transactional tasks.
System Impacts: Changes in where data is entered and how it is viewed, including the transition to mobile self-service.
Policy Impacts: Situations where the Workday configuration requires a change in organizational policy, such as standardized approval thresholds for expenses.
Listen for concrete pain points and operational details (hand‑offs, manual steps, approvals). Listen for these “trigger” phrases:
"In Workday, this is standard..." This usually means a process change for the business.
"We can't do that exact step anymore..." This is a potential pain point.
"The Manager will now have visibility to..." This is a WIIFM (What's In It For Me) win.
“This will be a change for our managers…” This is potential resistance.
This gives you a traceable, workshop‑anchored change impact library that you can later validate and refine with process owners.
2. Identify Stakeholders and Priorities
Use process discussions to surface who is truly impacted.
As SMEs walk through As‑Is and Workday To‑Be flows, actively note every role, team, and location that touches each step, not just the people in the room.
When someone says “then the plant supervisor signs off” or “HRBP cleans this up in the background,” add those roles to your stakeholder list and mark whether they are primary (doing the work) or secondary (approvers, reviewers, data consumers).
This turns the meeting into a live stakeholder‑identification engine aligned to real workflows rather than org charts.
Mine attendees and sponsors for stakeholder names and networks
During discussion, listen for references to specific people or committees who influence decisions: “We’ll need Legal,” “Finance will push back,” “The works council has views on this.”
Capture these names/groups and, before closing, do a quick “who else needs to be in or informed about this design?” round‑robin, explicitly asking for departments, geographies, and key individuals.
This helps you uncover hidden influencers and gatekeepers you will later map for a stakeholder engagement plan.
Classify stakeholders by influence and impact in real time
As participants speak, assess both how affected they are by the change (impact) and how much sway they appear to have (influence).
Use cues like who drives decisions, who others defer to, and who owns critical processes to tag groups as high/medium/low influence and impact, feeding directly into your power‑interest grid or stakeholder map.
This lets you walk out of the meeting with not just a longer list, but a prioritized view of which stakeholders require close engagement vs. periodic updates.
Observing Behavioral Cues
Watch who pushes back on design choices, who insists on exceptions, and who champions standardization. Capture these behaviors as indicators of stakeholder priorities, influence, and potential resistance, and map them into your stakeholder and change‑network plans. Look for signs of:
Enthusiasm and Advocacy: Individuals who immediately see the benefits and begin brainstorming how their team can adapt.
Cognitive Dissonance: Stakeholders who struggle to understand how the new system logic differs from the old.
Protective Resistance: SMEs who insist that their current, complex processes cannot be changed because of unique "local requirements." This often masks a fear of loss of control or job security.
3. Turn Real Process Stories into a Training Scenario Library
Every time SMEs describe “how we do it today” or walk through a Workday “day in the life,” treat it as raw material for realistic training scenarios.
Capture concrete examples (edge cases, high‑volume workflows, painful exceptions) and later convert them into scripts for simulations, exercises, and job aids that mirror actual work,
Over time, the design sessions become your primary source for a role‑based scenario catalog (e.g., “manager initiates off‑cycle promotion,” “HR processes complex international transfer”) that anchors your training in real work.
Treat every design session as training content development time
Document realistic, job-relevant scenarios: "As a hiring manager, I need to extend an offer to a candidate"
Note any "gotchas" - places where users might get stuck, make errors, or need workarounds
During the session, document great business stakeholder questions.
You're building training content in real-time rather than scrambling later
You ensure training scenarios reflect the actual system, not generic examples
You identify subject matter experts while their engagement is high
You can start recruiting and preparing your champion network early
4. Craft the "WIIFM" (What’s In It For Me) Narrative
Effective change management requires a "compelling case for change" or a "burning platform" that motivates employees to leave the comfort of the status quo. Pay close attention to how participants describe their frustrations with the current state and what they hope Workday will fix.
Capture their exact phrases about pain (“chasing signatures,” “re‑keying data,” “no visibility”) and desired outcomes (“one place to see my team,” “fewer spreadsheets”) and reuse this language when you write WIIFM by audience.
For instance, if a finance SME notes that they currently spend three days a month manually reconciling headcounts between two different systems, that becomes a powerful "Why Workday" story.
This lets you build WIIFM statements such as “For managers, Workday means no more chasing paper forms—approvals and team data in one place,” directly grounded in what people told you in the room.
Bridge the gap between technical features and business value by documenting these pain points and highlighting how Workday directly solves existing problems.
Current State Pain Point
“I never know where an approval stands in the process.”
“I have to enter the same data into three different systems.”
“Reports are out of date by the time I receive them.”
Future State Solution
Real-time process history and automated notifications
Single source of truth with integrated HCM, FIN, SCM
Live dashboards with drill-down capabilities
Strategic Value
Increased transparency and accountability
Reduced administrative burden and data accuracy
Data-backed decision-making for leaders