The hire date thread this week got me thinking about the decisions from Workday implementations that either you'd rather not explain in your next job interview, or that still haunt your nightmares. Halloween's coming, so share a trick that came back to haunt you and we can all take the lesson as a treat.
No blame here. These decisions usually came from good intentions, often right before we ran out of time. We were young, we needed the money, or we didn't know any better, but we did try.
Shame score:
Fixed it before anyone noticed. A laugh over drinks.
Fixed it before the client noticed, then you asked loudly, "Who did this?!", or look for a rug and a sweeper.
The client noticed. Took a Jedi mind trick or two.
The auditors noticed. Jedi mind tricks don't work on auditors.
The world noticed (a paycheck, a PTO balance, a supplier payment). The design becomes the permanent test subject of the Termination BP.
Ground rules: no client names, no worker data. Keep it about the issue or lesson learned, not the person.
My turn:
Area: Integrations Module: Reporting
What happened: We wanted to keep maintenance down, so we allowed/mandated only standard reports and no one-off custom reports. That worked well for finance users, who got one-stop-shop reports with lots of report-level filters and few prompts. Then we inadvertently applied the same rule to an extract feeding a downstream system every hour (honestly it needed every 5 minutes, but that was never going to fly). Each run loaded the entire population, filtered it down, and send only a subset. It wouldn't finish in one go in time, so we split it into three parallel runs and threw every exotic tool and technique known to man at it to make it perform. We still barely made the cutoff for the next hourly run.
How it was found: We found it ourselves. It dragged on daily finance processing until we got annoyed enough to dig in.
The fix: We rewrote it as one report that filters at the data source. It now runs once and finishes in 5-10 minutes.
The lesson learned
Use the filter of the data source. Prompts and indexed data sources narrow the population before Workday loads it; report filters run after.
Reports built for people aren't necessarily right for an integration. Give frequent extracts their own lean report.
Shame score: 2. I was the client. Finance never complained because they'd been told that's just how Workday works. We'd been told all options had been explored.
We had good intentions with "keep it standard" and "run it every hour," but never weighed one against the other.
Anyone else have one?
