New HR Leadership Improves their Functional Workday Foundation for Now; Sets the Stage for Tomorrow’s Skills Strategies

One of the world’s leading private investment firms (with over $100+ billion in AUM) was looking to modernize its HR tech stack to match the growing needs of its world-class talent pool — which was expanding, and, of course, dealing with new challenges in a more hybrid, post-pandemic workforce.

On a mission to create lasting impact for their investors, teams, businesses, and the communities in which they live, the investment bank pioneered a consulting-based approach to client relationships, focused on a diverse asset management mix, including private equity, public equity, fixed income, credit, venture capital, and real estate investments across multiple sectors and industries.

The firm recently brought in new HR Leadership charged with creating an employee experience to match its customer experience. That team immediately began analyzing its back-end tech stack (including Workday) to align it business goals. The scope was broad: With 20+ offices, and 1,600 team members worldwide, the new leadership had big ambitions to enable their high-performing teams with the necessary tools to remain an investment industry leader.

As they launched into 2023, the new HR leadership team sought to find the right HR and Skills strategies to support their diverse, demanding workforce, and ensure they had the right technology programs and support to accomplish their goals.

Setting a New Course and Stabilizing the Workday Tenant 

The firm strongly believes its people, and the shared values they’ve embraced since their founding, remain their core competitive advantage.

As such, the new leadership wanted to ensure their employee experience continued to support that vision. Unfortunately, when they “opened their technology hood,” they realized their Workday instance needed “some work” to enable them to support their talent and experience aspirations.

With almost no one left on the team from their original Workday implementation, they decided to launch an RFP to maximize their Workday investment and transform the legacy system into a functional and effective foundation for today, with an eye to future optimization and modernization.

• Get the tenant aligned with the state of the current organization, and evolving business processes, and empower the team to support new strategic business goals
• Assess and improve their position management functionality
• Tactically set up the budgetary process functionality
• Review job profiles and recommend advances to improve structure, configuration, and security
• Assess and recommend improvements to the overall security configuration
• Improve reporting configuration
• Get the team ready to deploy the Workforce Planning module, and share any tactical or programmatic changes the team might need to accomplish their business goals

In addition to tactical support, leadership wanted a partner who could marry Workday technology recommendations with an eye to supporting their overall HR strategy. By evaluating both their current HCM and Talent implementation (but also their vision and goals) to mutually create a new HR Tech Roadmap that provides support for their Employee Engagement goals.

They sought to transform Workday into a functional and effective tool for their internal organization by making the needed adjustments to configuration and processes. Further, setting the right foundation to take the platform forward, with an eye to future optimization and modernization.

After a competitive RFP, the team selected Skillcentrix for this critical mission because they liked the team’s united approach, aligning both talent strategy and exceptional Workday Technical prowess to ensure both critical pillars of the implementation were covered. They were also fans of Skillcentrix’s exclusive focus on the Workday talent and skills lifecycle – ensuring that the firm would get true experts working on their project.

Maximizing HR Efficiency and Employee Experience

The partner selected; the HR team shared additional goals for the launch. Keys to success for the project were modernizing the firm’s approach to recruiting, workforce planning, compensation, and reporting and dashboards by leveraging best-in-class technology structure and getting the company ready to roll out a corporate-wide skills strategy in the future.

But they didn’t want to sit on the sidelines. Another reason the team down-selected Skilllcentrix from the RFP, was the player-coach nature of their approach, which would ultimately empower the newly formed HR team to take ownership of the Workday system from their IT counterparts. (The ultimate goal? Drive more throughput for HR in an understandably busy IT prioritization cycle—in Investment Firms, as you can imagine, customer experience and buy-side requests always come first.)

Luckily for the firm, Skillcentrix was founded to solve just exactly these problems in Workday based on challenges the team had watched for 20+ years. They presented a structured approach based on the firm’s unique challenges to maximize the firm’s existing Workday investment and set up long-term success, which included:

• A complimentary half-day executive Insights Workshop: Comprised of a Discovery session, a review of current and future state goals, and ending with a talent and technology maturity assessment against peer benchmarks.This resulted in a custom initial talent roadmap and actionable recommendations the team could begin to implement (both in partnership with Skillcentrix and even some on their own!)
• A follow-up Talent Strategy and Tenant Assessment and review of their Skills Cloud foundation and conduct (by request) a complete analysis of their HCM technology functionality. This included: Longer-term engagement roadmap to address their most pressing concerns in recruiting, workforce planning, comp, and reporting

This approach created a true partnership between Skillcentrix and the firm, which appreciated our team’s deep expertise in Workday HR Talent strategy, as well as a measured approach to modernizing the HR tech stack.

The co-created roadmap allowed leadership to effectively put out some immediate fires while feeling confident that their technology layer was also being set up for long-term durability and – all the while – creating the critically important modern employee experience that was driving the need to change.

“Right-Sized Bites” and Improved Collaboration

The initial results of the Skillcentrix tenant assessment provided a consumable Roadmap to get Workday stable across the organization to serve their talent needs, with an eye to talent transformation and strategic workforce planning.

Skillcentrix moved quickly into execution mode and even expanded its engagement to provide ongoing AMS-managed support across the entire Workday HCM platform. Through initial successes, the Skillcentrix team established themselves as a trusted advisor, and leadership from both companies are viewing this as a burgeoning long-term partnership.

The new HR SVP expressed her thoughts on the burgeoning relationship by sharing, “Extremely high praise [for your partnership]. The ability of the Skillcentrix team to take the information they learned from the Insights Workshop and technical assessment to turn around a detailed action plan for us within a short period of time was impressive!

It turned the daunting task of figuring out how/where to start this technology remobilization effort into a clearly defined roadmap with project sequencing so we could get started right away.

By breaking the project into bite-size pieces, it has kept the team motivated and has allowed us to have some quick wins.  Skillcentrix has turned into an extension of our team and glad we have your expertise and partnership on this important initiative for the firm and our employees.”