Workday Change by Design

Join cognitive colleagues in engaging conversations with ordinary people who are making extraordinary impacts in the workday ecosystem. Stay informed as Dana and Nick introduced you to new, noteworthy and actionable insights featuring leading industry experts and collaborators. In each episode you'll hear from everyday superheroes as they share insights from their careers and offer advice to others on how to collectively contribute to a better workday every day. Welcome back everyday superheroes. We are recording episode for today and it's all about a fun, fun topic. But before we get into that, I'm glad to be back. I'm glad to be chatting with Nick and Jake again. I'm talking about, you know, what we've been up to. Nick, how have you been? I've been pretty good and welcome back by the way. Yes, yes. I hope everybody enjoyed me taking the lead last time around, but I'm very happy that you're going to be able to do so this time. But no, it's been pretty good. I never know what's going to happen on a week-to-week basis. And I've actually done something kind of super where two weeks ago I was brought into a client who I've heard about and never had to work with before. And suddenly two weeks before go, live, they had to completely restructure their costs in our hierarchy. So yeah, that was not the easiest thing to do, but we got it done at least 99% of the way, I think. So yeah, we still got a little bit of cleanup work to do there, but I was happy I was able to come in at the end, work with some, you know, imperfect data and get them ready to go for their go live. Well, that is super. Anything that makes us have to work really hard last minute. I mean, come on, I give you props. I'm clapping over here. Good job. I would have appreciated like another week or so, but you know what I'll take it. Right. Never perfect. No, and, you know, we were always working on somebody else's timeline. So I respect that. And I don't doubt you did an excellent job. You can go out 99%. I'm sure it was great. Somebody called me amazing, so I'll take it. See? Yeah, we're our worst critics, right? We never, it can never be perfect if it's just ourselves evaluating each other, but I'm sure you did great. Yes. What about you all? You've been up to anything good? Um, you know, I've been working a lot of staff augmentations in the last few months, which is fine. I don't know that I have had any super hero moments per se. I mean, just in general, not work related, but like actually moving home, even if it is only half a mile south of where I was, um, that in itself for me has been a pretty super duper thing that I've been up to. Um, I mean, that's why I wasn't here for those. Um, I mentioned that the other episode I was moving needed that time. And it's still, gosh, it is such a process. I don't recommend. I really do know it. Um, but yeah, you know, just keeping organized and that that kind of, the kind of things you do in a move, I can always relate to the implementation. You know, there's all this prep work and then it happens and then you got to do a little cleanup after and get yourself settled. Well, and you still have a day job? I still have a day job. And that ended up itself is another one. What about you, Jake, you managed anything cool? Yeah. So, uh, to Dana's point, I've been moving every year for the last four years. So I, I hear your pain there, but hopefully you're, you're almost fully moved in and everything. Um, but yeah, uh, it's something I've been working on are a slew of reports. Uh, a client had to change their whole SEC reporting structure. Um, very confident on their side of how this would work with a very tight deadline. Um, and I was happy to kind of take a step back, uh, rethink about the solution and was able to deliver all the reports just a little earlier than they were expecting. So I think that's a, a good thing to always think about taking a step back takes a little time, but it might get you to the solution faster than, than you ever thought. Well, I'm hearing a common theme about how our lives have been and they all involve change. So, Dana, what are we going to be talking about today? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Good one. Real great segue into our conversation today with a couple of different people that know a lot about change management. Um, they're going to bring a bunch of experience and an insight to us. And, um, yeah, you know, change, change is not just, uh, in one area, okay? This is something as we, you know, it covers many, many things. And, you know what? I think you can take it outside of work day even. And so if you're, if you're listening to this and you're like, I don't know if I'm going to need to know about change management and work day, well, maybe you can take away some insights into some other parts of your lives, just like we've talked about so. Well, some good tips. All right, I think on that, let's get into it. Let's. This episode of Everyday Superheroes is brought to you by Workday Drive. Do you need a collaborative space to share files and work with live data? Workday Drive might be the right place for you. From discovery boards and worksheets, pulling Workday Data, or external files created outside of Workday, Workday Drive provides a central collaboration space for day-to-day administration and project support. To learn more about how you can best use Workday Drive, check us out at cognitiveing.com and see how we can save your work day. Hi, guys. I'm so glad to be joining you for this episode of season two because I missed the last one, as you know. Thank you for backing me up and handling release one of 2025. This episode is exciting, right? For all of us, I think there's absolutely no reason why we don't know what the heck change management is. If you work in Workday, you happen to know what that might entail no matter the area you're in. So, very happy to have a couple of guests join us today. We have a nice little round table. First, we have Catherine Grop, who works for SEI Consulting. She is based out of Massachusetts. She's a Principal Consultant, and we have worked together very specifically on particular implementation. Welcome, Catherine. Thank you. Thanks for having me. Welcome to the show, and welcome back Dana. Thank you so much. Yes, this is what I like to do. So, further to Catherine, we have another expert in change management, and that's one of our internal colleagues, Jennifer Erickson. She's a senior member of our PMO, and she's the architect. In fact, behind cognitive change management service. When I was a project manager, we worked together, and that's when she joined and said, "Hey, what about change?" So welcome, Jennifer, and thanks for bringing that service to the company. Absolutely. So happy to be here. Thanks. Yeah, you betcha. And, of course, too, because you don't live too far away from me in the great state of Minnesota. We have a few things in common there. So, let's get right into this fun conversation about change management. There's really so much that we could talk about. I think the one thing that makes me get really interested is, of course, when we are in an implementation with a customer, and we start out, and we're always thinking, "Okay, you know, we've got this great project team. We're building all these things, and we're helping them test, but then what happens at the end?" And you both have supported initiatives like that, and more. What is really, like, why do you go into a project where you're just getting, you're joining a team, you're starting out, figuring out what they're going to need? What are some key things that a client or a customer can really be adopting when they're just trying to figure out their methodology for getting change management live? Catherine? Sure. I think one of the most important things early on in the project is really understanding, starting the documentation process of what, not only the technology change, but user changes, because I think one of the challenges that comes later stage in the process is that the kind of tool is ready, work day is ready, everyone's ready to start using it, but we're not quite as clear how user roles are changing, so early on when there's all the configuration happening, also having somebody understanding what is happening to each user role, and really documenting what those changes are going to be, so that way you can come up with a clearer plan when you get to go live. So that's one of the things I really try to stress with clients is making sure that you're understanding what beyond the technology change is happening, what's actually happening, changing in the organization for each user, so you can more tailor what you're actually going to have to do to help get them over the hump of the change of implementing work day. Right. So you're saying it's much more than just work day, you shouldn't just go in and say, "All right, we're focusing on work day change." No, no, no, this is organizational. Yes, exactly, and a lot of times it's hard to know that, it's hard for the folks that are actually doing the testing, they're coming up, doing all the work books, and everything, it's sometimes hard for those folks to focus on that aspect, so that's where I think sometimes change can be really helpful, change management capacity, if change management can be helpful earlier on in projects, to focus a little bit more on that and work with folks to give them suggestions of how you can document the current state, the future state for those roles. That's a really good point, and something that Jennifer had shared in advance of this recording actually was how they've even gone into it and been using maybe a little bit of a different term, Jennifer. It was you that noted what was organizational readiness, was that you? Yes, so how does that pertain to the things you've been doing? Absolutely, yes, thank you, Catherine, documenting all of those changes, super important. I think it's also important, I just want to throw in there, to document what is not changing. Yes, absolutely, throughout it. Yeah, and then circling back at it to understand the impact of those, because if you're right in the moment, you're like, oh my gosh, that's all change, and that's a change, and that's a change. If you're looking at really overwhelmed, and then when you step back, you're like, okay, well, those are like really little nits, and we don't have to focus on those, but it's these three, five, ten, biggies that we need to put in to your point, Dana, the organizational readiness, and making sure that the user, it's kind of the model that we use here at cognitive to focus on understanding, understanding why, what, when, how, and then the skills. And am I engaged, or am I engaging the right people in the organization through it, and then are for results? So we've got the neat little user thing going on there, but it's really making sure that we do keep that end user at top of mind. I think that that can be a really big miss for organizations when they just kind of keep it in that technical headspace. Well, this is like the best way to make it work in work day, and we tested it, and it worked so move to prod. I think it's a really good point. You know, even when I started in work day, I was on the client side, and I think what happens a lot in the ecosystem is that, unfortunately, many of these, whether it's a system update, or an upgrade, or a complete switch over to work day, is sometimes the rapid nature of how these things can happen. And I didn't know how much of an involvement I was going to have until probably a month into the project, right? I knew I was going to be part of it. I didn't realize in the end I was going to be the HRIAS owner, which I was more than ready to do, but I think you're bringing up a really good point there is you've got so many different end users, and just what is it going to mean for you, communicating that early, can really help make everybody feel more comfortable with what the future state's going to be? I remember an implementation from many years back pre-cog, and I was an external consultant to it, and was brought in kind of the 11th hour, honestly, it was like four months before go live, and they had a spreadsheet of changes with hundreds of items, and there's no way we could have been effective with tackling any of that. So the first plan was to prioritize these, and then also by user persona, right? So does it impact HRIAS? Is it impacting our customer support, call center, group environments, whatnot, and we heat mapped it to where we really needed to target our energies and focus for that really short runway to launch? Yeah, Jennifer, I've had experiences like that where we're kind of free engaging change a little bit later stage in the project, and it's like going back and trying to figure out what exactly is going to be changing, and you get this laundry list, and you have to kind of sort through the priorities that can be really challenging. Yeah. Well, so do you have to lean on a combination of groups of people? How do you find it to be most effective? Maybe not just for those situations where you come in late, but even just with the right people that you have engaged to get the right information, because we know, for example, that we can't just rely on like say one person going going what we're streaming and taking notes, like there's more than that, because you don't want to forget the key stakeholders in this. So you know, how do you really set up, we can call it a framework, or whatever you want to call it, and like how do you know who to bring to this table? I guess that's what I'm getting out. Yeah, I think it also kind of goes a little bit to what Nick was saying about at the start of a project when everybody, not even just change aspect, but everyone's getting involved in the project, really understanding what everyone's roles and responsibilities are going to be, so that way you can kind of see if there's a work stream for a certain area of work day, and there's only one lead, and there's really no one else involved. You can quickly identify that that's probably going to be a problem, because that person's not going to be able to go to all the other work stream meetings that they need to do the documentation. It's really kind of that probably going back to what Jennifer was saying too, about the operational readiness, even within the project, as you're starting it, making sure that you have the right capacity of people to cover all these aspects, because it's really challenging to rely on only one person per work day functional area. You really have to have little team set up with clear roles and responsibilities within those teams, so you know who's the one that's responsible for going to the cross-functional calls, or doing the documentation, or going to the change of management meetings, or reviewing the training materials. It's helpful to set that up at the beginning of a project, so everybody knows what happens throughout the whole time, from beginning to end, who's responsible for what, and eventually who's going to own the system when it's live too. Well, and everybody's got a day job already, right? I think that's one of the biggest challenges, and one of the things that I don't think is necessarily appreciated when you go from a system that is maybe not as robust as work day, or just works differently. I don't think I've ever seen an organization that didn't end up hiring more people just to make sure that they were doing work day the right way, right? And so now you're working with some employees who are just trying to do their job. This new system's coming in. You're getting stretched then, and then by the way, at the end, there's a whole lot more work to do. We've only got started. Right. Well, have you been on those kinds of projects where that happens, and what did you do? You know, you can only do so much. Yeah. Yeah. You know, there's various approaches and varies by project, and business group, you know, is it that everybody has access to the one document where we're capturing and logging changes as they pop to mind across various workstreams, right, as they're working through design, or they're getting into testing, and they're like, oh, this is operating differently than I thought it was going to. Or there's, okay, so do I resource my workstream, my change or extreme, more, and that change resource is in each of the meetings to count. You know, trying to glean out of that, where those changes happen. And I think another lens might be broadening, not necessarily a testing group, but I've started calling them power user previews. And of your testing cycle to, you know, do a little demo, a little show and tell, and get them nodding or get them freaking out, right? That's a good temperature gauge. Or if there is more hands-on opportunity for them, maybe I'll let them go in a little cold, and just see how much they can navigate and complete with minimal guidance to help you then kind of further gauge, okay, where are my gaps, and where do we really need to amp up communications or training or leveraging, you know, other support tools? And are you saying you're doing that kind of, like, with a focus group, you didn't use those words, the super user power user, somebody that isn't involved with the project, but will be a user, a power user, as you said. Yeah, yeah, I'm working on a project right now where we're implementing recruiting, and it's a very broad user audience, very geographically dispersed. And, you know, we've pulled in 20 people at that point who are going to be some of the heaviest users as well. It's building that support and understanding. It's engaging them early enough instead of, you know, two weeks before co-live. And they're also going to become those experts, in a sense, that will help others once we are live. Right, well, Catherine, you have experience with that too, because that's where I first kind of came into this, like, you use change agent network, is that right? Yes, and you're very pro getting this group together. That's kind of, like, maybe part of the project, but also some external users, right? You know, like the people that will be using this. Yeah, and actually it's a really, it's a really good topic because Jennifer, I've been thinking about it a lot in terms of the way that I have approached it as of late with this change agent network, which is basically identifying end users across all different departments, all different areas to have representation within this group that would get information, sneak peeks, demos, etc. But we use it a lot as a communication tool to make sure messaging was getting out. Whereas I think that there's a lot of value in actually having some superusers within that group or a different group coming in and actually seeing things hands on more. The more recent project that I was on, we did do that where we had two people. It's a higher education and it was two faculty members that got very involved and gave us a lot of insight that the project team specifically maybe thought of, but didn't have the capacity to think of that one user group. So having those beyond just a communication mechanism of a change agent network or change network that I think is a common practice for a change management. It's more of that actually like user, almost like user acceptance testing, but you're doing it really, really early on. Like you have a little subgroup of people that are giving feedbacks. I think it's hard to, especially if you have a lot of different user groups that are going to have different requirements, they're going to have different needs, they're going to want to communicate things differently. It's hard to find all of that out two weeks before go live and then not really be able to make configuration changes that might be beneficial a lot of times they are. So I think that's a great kind of way to have a more active group versus just a group that you're communicating messaging out to. So thinking about, we've been talking about timeframes here. Do you think there's ever a time where it's too early to be thinking about change management? No. No. No. Always think about change. I know this team for was hoping the obvious answer, but I think maybe to the point where sometimes we all are brought in to help as part of a project is that sometimes maybe these simple concepts we're talking about, right? Let people get their hands on, let them think about what the new systems going to do, how the jobs may change, is that sometimes it is a little bit of an afterthought and once it's an afterthought it's too late. Yeah. Well, I think it's hard to because when you're in the throws of the configuration, they're moving, like the teams are moving real fast. So they're not, they don't really have the capacity to be able to step aside and say, like, well, let me think about this from 10 different users' perspectives. So it's always helpful to have people that are a little bit more focused on that separately than over taking more capacity away from the people that are actually trying to configure the system and get it, test the system and get it ready. Yes, yes, yes, and yes, right? It's human nature to want answers. And if we change practitioners, project leaders, change leaders in our organization aren't providing answers or information, people will make it up. Yes, yes. And that can go wrong in a really, really fast moment. So getting that information out there, getting other voices to be able to, no, no, I saw the system. I was in this meeting last week and I can tell you, it looks pretty cool. That is way better than any three bullet points in an all-hand's meeting. This is making me think of a couple of things, if I may hear. So one, obviously, have been on the, you know, very much in the weeds, not only as a client, be, you know, part of implementing for the organization I worked for, but then of course on the other side and the project management side. And I think what you see in that in the weeds is that, no, you're definitely, as we said, not thinking about those 10 different departments that might all do something 10 different ways. And there's a bit of a fear. I have experienced in even suggesting, oh, we're going to bring in a focus group and we're going to show them what workday does because here's the fear. Oh my god, they're not going to like it or they're all going to give us 10 different points of feedback and we can't possibly give everybody that they want. But I think that what we're also saying is, but if we give them the opportunity and we sell it and we want them part of it, they may even be more open to accepting this new way and maybe less inclined to provide us with all their, you know, open-ended feedback. And I think that that's what you clearly can help organizations with, right, is like, no, no, don't be scared. Like, this is good for you. Yeah, because a lot of times they're coming up with those, we need to have all of these requirements because they don't know what the system can do. Yeah. So if you show them, hey, this is a way that you can do this in a much more, you know, much improved way, they might take a few of those requests off the list. And if you can explain to them and show them, you know, why something can't work, having those conversations without it being the system being live and saying, sorry, we didn't ask earlier. It's a lot easier to do it earlier on to get them on board. Oh, for sure. And providing the context for why I'm asking and what we hope to get out of this. And I don't have a magic wand so I cannot promise everything. And let's, let's categorize some of these as a critical must, a nice to have. Hey, I know I'm probably late to the party with this one. So maybe we just put it on the list for after we're live. Right. Instead of saying, no, you can't have this. No, you can't have that. It's, hey, work day doesn't enable that functionality. Sorry, unfortunate. It's, it's just not me. Or it's, hey, this has impacts on other areas. So for that reason, you know, we cannot do that. Getting more than just the nope, not doing that one. Yeah, that's kind kind of why I was, you know, teeing up that is there ever too early of a time to start with change management, right? Whoever your end users are going to be, your influencers are going to be, your champions are going to be, right? Being able to communicate early enough on how everything's going to go can really help make sure that if somebody thinks that they're not going to get something they need, you never precluded necessarily if something can work within the work day system on being able to get what you need at the right time. And, you know, change management doesn't stop at go live, right? And so being able to communicate openly and say, hey, yeah, we're hearing the requirements that you're looking for, the things that might be impacting you. But if you're communicating early, you can also demonstrate that the methodology is we're going to prioritize. We're going to have the parking lot, we're going to have the fast follows, whatever you want to call them, that you're not locked in just because you're seeing something at the zero hour on testing doesn't mean you're done, right? And maybe that group grows over time, right? You start with a few people and then it builds as you get into testing and more of that UAT, but that's one of the things that I think can really be beneficial that when you think about change management from the beginning of a project, you can really help make sure that the communication piece is being done the right way. And that's where I was thinking to next, you know, like there's obviously all these activities that are going on. We're building documentation, figuring out how we get people to even understand the system. But yeah, the communication in itself in general, right? There were one of you in my questionnaire responded that it's like it's better to just share the things are changing and that there will be more information later than to hold it in general. Yeah, yeah, yeah. People want to know what's coming, even if it's not a lot of info, right? Yeah, or it's the here's the current thinking and the direction going and where you haven't even started testing. So this certainly could change, but I just want to let you know, this is what we're working on right now. I don't think there's any harm in that. No, no, I think it's also like if you're giving people information and digestible bites earlier on, it helps a little bit when you get to the go live if it being overwhelming. Right. Yes, yes, yeah, yeah. So speaking of the go live, because obviously there is different amounts of work that are going to be done. We've identified that sometimes you just don't get the same length of runway on every project that you get brought onto. You know, what might be key ways that an organization can in maybe that scenario where it has been a little late to the game, like how can they at least be there prepared available for their employees when they are live and things maybe aren't going as smooth, like sure, we've experienced that. But to me, it does relate to change management because you're thinking, well, what the heck, how come they didn't know? Well, multiple reasons, but what different kinds of things have you both done to help them post go live? Post go live or like lead like during like when you're alive, like because Catherine for us, I kind of remember certain meetings being held regularly. Yeah, yeah, I think so and I was going to kind of lead in to go live. So I think one of the things that I try to do the months coming up is have a clear communication plan of here are the different weeks between now and four weeks ish maybe even more than that post go live. Here are the things we're going to be communicating week over week over a week. So people know what messaging is going out and then we shared that with the leadership teams as well. So they could then help enforce the messaging that was going to be coming out over those different weeks. But part of that we also had and you know, on most projects, I would hope that you're having training during that period going up to go live and clearly finding a place where if it's an internet, if it's if you're using work day learning, that's also great, but that you can't really do until after you go live. But having a clear place where users can get all their training materials, where where's the centralized place where they can go and get that information, setting up a support network. So people know who are the right folks to go to to ask questions, have open office hours that people can drop into if it's in person or for its virtual, setting up all of those pieces before the go live and making sure a three year change agent networks, three year leadership teams. Everyone knows what messaging is going to be coming out and where can they find their training materials and where can they get help. And then, you know, beyond that, if they're just looking for conversations to get help, but then you might even have another layer of if something goes wrong, if a data point is wrong, how do they submit an issue there? And that's where you have your internal, you know, IT ticketing systems and that kind of thing. But kind of putting all those things into place before the go live is really important. I would agree and add, I think one of the groups that we sometimes miss is thinking about your IT organization or your HRIS. So where is that support model? If I'm a user and I have a question, where do I go? Right? If that is submit a ticket somewhere. Who's responding to those? And did they know what the hack is going on today? You know, do they have access to the FAQs of things of, you know, I can't log in. Most everybody's on an SSO platform now, but or just how do I, how do I submit a time off request? And, you know, I'm just speaking more on the HCM side here. Having, okay, here's the link to the knowledge article, the workday help article, whatever it might be. And also knowing that, hey, this sounds like a functionality or a data integrity thing. And this is going to get escalated over here to the HRIS group and who are these people? Right. So not to forget those other things, like, you know, it's not just go live, plug and play. I wish. Right. So, yeah, I guess change management, when we talk about it, it's just so much more than this general idea of, yep, just, you know, tell people how to do new things when they go into their brand new shiny work day. No, no, it's not that. Where can I get more help? How do I help? How do I log issues? What you're saying? Yeah. And I have a question here. So, to preface, my New Year's resolution this year was to work on planning and organization. So, when I typically go through an implementation or some of these bigger projects, a lot of the decision making starts to change over time. If you want to take my old school way of organization, it's continuing to add notes at the bottom of the page and just keep that going. But this isn't a great way of, you know, trying to see all of those changes and what the current decision is, hence my resolution. How do you organize that? How do you keep track of that and really make sure everyone's kind on the same page, especially with all the decision changing over time? Great question, Shay. It's hard. I'm not going to lie. And you're coming off the top rope with the hard questions there. That's what I mean. Right. I think we all struggle with that. It's not just change management. It's a really, really great thing to discuss, though, because that in itself is change management. It is a big area. Yeah. And Jennifer, Catherine, you probably experienced, too, where maybe some decision was made to change something. And in fact, you weren't part of that. You didn't know. And now you find it out later. So, yeah, like, how would you answer that question? I think it's just continuing checking in and validating on that, you know, prioritize list of changes, checking in with that work stream. Am I still on top of this? Has anything shifted or changed? I also love engaging my work stream gurus in terms of reviewing drafted comms, FAQs, training resources or materials. That's sometimes another way to catch it, instead of just looking at the list again. Catherine, what would you say? Yeah, I think one of the successful ways I've seen it done is more so on the project side is using something like a raid log that you can go back to in reference, but the important part to kind of bring that to change management is making sure that the work stream teams and leads know, okay, we made this decision. Is this something that we think we need to communicate and have a change management support on? And then taking that from the change management side and having like a change impact log where you can, you know, maybe they're linked together, maybe it's the same document, you can put it all together and one thing. But it's that kind of mind shift for those work stream leads to make sure if they're thinking about, we made this decision, is this something we might need some help with? We might need, they don't have to, you know, be the one to write the communication or come up with the training material, but just thinking that how do they kind of make connect those dots a little bit more and then change can come in and actually help action on whatever needs to be done to communicate, train, et cetera on those changes. But that's a good way that I've seen that it's pretty effective, but you do have to be pretty, you have to be paying attention, you have to really go into those logs every day and see what people are saying. But it folks can kind of get on board with, oh wait, I know this is going to be a change. I know I have somebody that is focused on change management that can help me with this and thinks that I think a little bit easier to keep track of it on the change side at least. So it sounds like there's a lot of tools. So I will be scrapping my word doxan heading over to these logs over here. Yeah, absolutely. So I think a lot of what all of us from our experience is always concerned about is, well, did we do enough? Right? Did we start early enough? Is everybody going to be ready? And a lot of what we do here on everyday superheroes is to make sure that people are feeling as ready as it can be. Look out for this, look out for that. But let's maybe if we can and I'll give you all a moment to think about it because I'm throwing this question out of nowhere, do you have any good success stories of even if it didn't go perfectly, right? Came out at the last minute, but this client did this one thing really good, right? There's so many go lies are going to be starting before too long, right? So if somebody's hearing this and saying, oh, I did this all wrong, do you have any good wins that you've gotten with a client to say, you know what? It wasn't perfect, but we did this right and it really did help in the end. Well, I will say that I think one of my lessons learned from your intake form was that there's always a way to do more improve. Like there's no implementation is ever perfect. There's always going to be a group that's missed. There's always going to be something. But I do think that one of the biggest wins that I've seen that really makes a big impact on it on a implementation going well from change management perspective is leadership being consistently engaged and spear in really, you know, defining what the clear vision is of what the why why why are we implementing work day? Why is this important? How is this going to be beneficial? And when they're still engaged all the way through and at the end, you know, thanking the teams and speaking up why this was done, I feel like that's kind of a big win that people still understand that this was an important thing that was done versus that kind of sometimes peter out a little bit along the way. I don't know if that's enough so they'll win, but it's definitely something I've seen that has made a difference. One of my favorite stories which I thought was going to be very, very scary at the outset that turned out good was as we were moving closer to launch the CEO of a large organization said, yes, I would like to be involved in testing mobile. Okay. Wow. This could go really bad. Okay. He did it. He loved it. He pulled out his phone everywhere in every meeting and said, you guys, look at this. This is the coolest stuff since sliced bread, right? Yeah. Yeah. It's easy and if I can do it. Oh my gosh. Yeah. So it probably wasn't easy, but you get the right person there singing your praises, right? Sometimes that win is the last minute thing, right? Nobody ever wants to be working up to the zero hour like that, but you get the right people behind you. I think I was hearing that from you two. You get the right leadership there as your champion. You can really get yourself somewhere really good at the beginning even though you have to keep going. Yeah. Because I think sometimes too, I think there can be like a change fatigue where if folks are only ever hearing from the project team about how great work day is, they can kind of tune you out a little bit. But when they hear Joe Schmo who sits next to me in the cubicle loves the mobile app, or he loves how he can submit his time now by using a time period or whatever the more recent change was, users tend to hear that stuff from each other a lot more effectively and from leadership, a lot more effectively than when they've been hearing from the change or the project team for a year or two years or whatever it is. And I think the other strategy if you're kind of in a panic moment of your change initiatives is wait, what do I need my users to do day one week one month one, right? If you're implementing all students or a full HCM or what, please don't go in and focus on goal setting and quarterly check-ins and your annual performance, if that's not going to happen for six, eight, nine, ten months, right? Sure. What do I need to do today? I need to find my pay slip, I need to enter my time and I need to know how to put in a vacation request. Don't. Sure. Yeah, exciting priorities, right? I get it. Mm-hmm. For sure. Well, there are so many more insights. I'm sure that you too could possibly share with us today. But there has been plenty that you have already talked about in this little while. We're going to be very pleased to share this episode with all of our users out there. What we're hearing is, you know, there's some key items that everybody needs to consider. Every project might be a little bit different, but there are some definite items that will be great assets for you in your organization and being successful. So we need you. We definitely need change managers. Yeah, we love change management and training. That's why we have you. Thank you both for joining us today. Yeah, thank you for having me. This is really fun. I'm glad I'm glad you reached out, Dana. I appreciate it. Absolutely. It's great meeting you all. Yes, you too. Thank you both. Thank you. Well, what a conversation we could have gone longer as we always say because change management is a heavy topic, but we, I think, learned a lot still and are going to be able to help clients be successful in future. Nick, what did you find was maybe your most important takeaway from today? Well, it's one thing that I've always kind of thought about. And I think I heard from the laughter when I mentioned it is there really is no too early time to get started with change management, right? And when we think about a system implementation, a lot of the times people are thinking about the button clicks or what's the training material going to be, but change management covers so much. And even if you start with just a couple of key stakeholders, realizing the impact of a system implementation, a workday update twice a year or anything, right? There can be a lot of impacts. And there's never too early of a time to be thinking about what does this mean? Completely. Even when you don't get pulled into a project until it's a few months before the go live. Well, everybody has their, everybody has their part to play, right? Maybe you don't have to be looking at it from the sky view, right? Some people need to be looking at everything. Some people need to be looking at what's really critical for them, but somebody should be thinking about what's going on. Somebody should be 100%. What about you, Dana? Well, this is something I experienced very much. It was part of why I wanted Catherine to join us because I saw the work that they were doing and how they were building this network of people to come in. These were, there were people involved with the change management that I didn't know. I was not working with them on the project. I did not know what their role was in everyday life, but what I knew was that they had some peace in the organization that either they, they were going to be able to be a good influencer of the changes or that maybe they just did, they had been there a long time and they did a lot of work day-to-day and considered to be a power user. But their, their voice was important and they in that, you know, in that particular project, Catherine and her team brought in the right people from the beginning to very much get that word out in all the areas. You can't just have a couple of people that are on a project team that are configuring and testing. You need way more than that to be able to share that knowledge and positively affect change. And you don't need too many cooks in the kitchen at the same time. No. You got to have the right people at the right time and that can be hard. Exactly. Yeah. What about you, Jake? Did you learn anything today? Yeah, first and foremost, learn that I have everything that I can do to take down this resolution of mine. But all jokes aside, it's, it's nice to hear some of the different tools and ways to kind of organize that change over time. Some of the key things around documentation, organizing that documentation and making sure everyone can find the, you know, most recent decision as quickly as possible. It really goes into the full communication cross-functionally as well. Oh, for sure. I'm sure there are even more tools that you're going to find on your journey of addressing your solution. Good for you. Yeah. And I think it comes down to this is a phrase I've used before is work with purpose, right? Start as early as you can. Have the right people in the room at the time you need them. Have the right tools so that everybody can stay organized and just, you know, find the best way for that you can do it. Nobody does it perfectly, right? But as long as you're working with some purpose and you've got the right change leaders in place, you can get a lot of really good stuff done. Absolutely. Yeah. Well, and, you know, on everyday superheroes, what we like to do, of course, we showcase ordinary people making extraordinary impacts and the work to ecosystem. We've all seen our change managers make those impacts. So this was a really fun and important conversation. We wanted to share with you all. Please do make sure that you are following cognitive ink on LinkedIn, get our, get our podcast on your Spotify reminders and, you know, check back with us next month when who knows what the heck we'll be talking about with the next everyday superhero. And as always, have a great work day.