The Met unlocks Workday’s full potential with Kainos Smart Test

Find out how this diverse institution is utilising automated testing to maintain Workday system integrity, supercharge compliance and deliver value for end-users.
Date posted
27 February 2024
Reading time
4 minutes

The goals

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Consolidate
fragmented testing approach
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Expand
test coverage across tenant
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Reduce
reliance on SMEs and HR staff
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Maximise
Workday ROI and user experience

The results

40%

reduction in testing effort during updates

900x

greater test coverage across Workday

95%

reduction in SME test support requirements

Leadership

focused on maximising Workday ROI

“I used to spend 95% of my week testing during updates, with Smart Test I’ve been able to reduce this to just five hours. There’s no way we would have ever been able to achieve the same coverage using a manual approach.”

Carlos Santamaria 
Manager of Workday Operations
The Met 

Operating across three sites, The Metropolitan Museum of Art (The Met) presents over 5,000 years of art from around the world for visitors to experience and enjoy. One of the largest museums in the world, The Met has more than seven million visitors annually and is one of the world’s most-visited art institutes.  

The Met is more than just a collection of art, employing more than 2,300 employees across curatorial, conservation, and education departments.  This unique mission statement carries across to The Met’s approach to its workforce, with forward-thinking solutions like Workday central to the museum’s vision for streamlined HR processes, efficient governance, and ultimately, satisfied employees.  

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A Workday journey begins 

The Met’s search for a new enterprise solution began as a finance team initiative to replace the organisation’s core HR and finance systems. Additional ageing sub-systems across departments, a growing variation of processes, and the need for a clear, holistic view of activity and data across the organisation further amplified the need for change. Having explored a variety of options, it was clear that Workday was the only viable solution. 

With the main legacy system’s expiration date approaching rapidly, The Met expedited a ‘big bang’ deployment of Workday Payroll and Financials. Further HR and finance modules were rapidly deployed to replace and consolidate legacy systems across the organisation.

Limited by siloed implementation 

With Workday fully implemented, the benefits could be felt across The Met. However, these benefits were limited by a fragmented implementation approach, with each department responsible for carrying out their own Workday implementation in isolation. With no centralised oversight after go-live, issues with data accuracy, quality assurance, productivity and security began to surface.  

Carlos Santamaria, Manager of Workday Operations at The Met, explains, “Data outputs from the different teams weren’t lining up, which was making it difficult for the business to get an accurate picture of key information for decision-making. At the time, the reason for this wasn’t clear.” 

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“For some time, departments had also been struggling to carry out and get consistent results during testing, but they lacked sufficient experience to identify and resolve issues. Staff didn’t understand testing principles: how to test; positive and negative scenarios; and most of all, the bigger picture of why this testing mattered. At the time, the significance of this wasn’t understood.” 

This approach to testing meant The Met couldn’t achieve a comprehensive overview of how business processes were interconnected, how security and integrations were configured, or the impact of change across its tenant. In addition, only a few senior leaders had access to the worker data necessary for testing, which made regression testing a difficult, time-consuming process. 

Inefficient strategy and ineffective testing 

With each department conducting their own independent testing during Workday’s bi-annual update windows, approaches were disconnected and differed greatly, resulting in inefficient and ineffective testing. During releases, 25 senior business partners and HR staff were required for each five-week preview window, distracting from their core roles and affecting project timelines.  

Carlos adds, “The Met was already using Smart Test for HCM, but our team running it at the time was completely isolated and couldn’t support us in any other areas of testing. Only the HRIS manager had full visibility of how update testing was carried out. We didn’t have a dedicated QA team, so bi-annual update testing was carried out by a team of business partners and HR staff. We had no capacity to test weekly, leaving us exposed to security risks.” 

“SMEs were trying to squeeze in testing around their daily jobs, so they weren’t 100% focused or testing thoroughly. Because testing was taking up the majority of available time during the preview period, internal projects were placed on hold and feature adoption was consistently pushed down the roadmap.”

Carlos Santamaria 
Manager of Workday Operations
The Met 
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Eventually this testing strategy became unsustainable, “Combined, these factors resulted in inadequate test coverage and heightened security risk,” says Carlos. “But it wasn’t until an external audit that the extent of the issues and the underlying causes were clearly identified. Our auditor highlighted that our security and roles, testing, and report outputs lacked consistency.”  

“We were basically treating Workday as three systems instead of the one unified system it is. We had two options; redesign our Workday configuration, or create a central Workday team to manage security, access controls and testing. We opted for the latter, and that’s when my team was born.” 

Automation supercharges testing  

The Met pursued a focused testing strategy with clear goals: establish a central Workday team, enforce robust Workday governance, and devise a scalable testing approach to minimise risk and maximise ROI. Given its intricate structure and resource constraints, test automation emerged as a crucial accelerator to achieve these objectives.  

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With Kainos Smart Test the only feasible solution to meet all of The Met’s testing and governance needs, business leaders quickly decided to implement it across their Workday tenant.

“Smart Test has been pivotal in allowing The Met to meet objectives, cutting testing time and increasing coverage. During the latest update release, we required 15 fewer staff to support the update, achieved 900x greater test coverage and reduced tester support requirements by 95%. This has allowed our SMEs and operational staff to focus on adopting new features and optimising our configuration to boost the experience for all end-users and maximise Workday ROI. Our leadership team are now no longer required for complex testing processes can drive strategic initiatives,” Carlos explains.

Testing beyond major updates 

“The latest update was miles apart from previous releases. I used to spend 95% of my week testing during updates, with Smart Test I’ve been able to reduce this to just five hours,” Carlos adds. “Even if we had tested around the clock, there’s no way we would have ever been able to achieve the same coverage using a manual approach. Because Smart Test’s clean interface and simple navigation makes it so easy to use, my team of testers can work more effectively, with fewer issues.” 

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Smart Test has also enabled The Met to extend the benefit of comprehensive testing beyond just the bi-annual updates. “With two unions and three business units, I always say that our organisational makeup is more like a little city than a company,” says Carlos.

“We have a long list of internal and external requirements we must comply with. Previously, we only had bandwidth to carry out approximately 90 tests per update—that was testing of functional BPs only. However, during the last update we ran over 50,000 regression tests at the click of a button—thoroughly testing our HCM, Security, Payroll and Financials.” 

Renewed confidence in governance and controls

The significant increase in testing coverage has given The Met’s senior leadership renewed confidence that their Workday configuration is adequately governed. Auditing has been simplified, with automated regression testing catching any issues caused by changes to their configuration and its test archive providing evidence for auditors instantaneously.

“By running our packs weekly, we’re also regularly verifying that all is well within our system, both from an operational perspective and a compliance perspective. If a change has any unexpected impacts, Smart Test catches it fast, provides evidence of what is wrong and keeps a record of when the correction is made. So we can quickly and easily show auditors that we’re monitoring our system and controls closely, fixing them when things go wrong, and can show evidence of how quickly we got the correction in place.”

With the support of Kainos, The Met has resolved its biggest post-deployment challenges. “We invested in Workday—a best-in-class cloud solution—to drive our organisation forward,” says Carlos. “Thanks to Smart Test, we’re now using it to its full potential.”

Find out more about how Smart Test can help your business get more out of Workday.