Thoughts on Workday training – a few months later & Configurable Security Fundamentals

It’s been a few months since I’ve had time to write here, but time to change that.  :-)

I had put some thoughts together back when I was first taking the Workday training courses, here and here. I’ve since taken a few more courses and am now sending my staff to the HCM Fundamentals course that I took, so a good time for a look back. I’ll start with the courses I’ve taken in the meantime…

The Configurable Security Fundamentals class
This is an ‘online only’ course, like a few of Workday’s offerings which are not offered in a classroom setting. As always, you can find more details about Workday courses here. It’s 10 hours spread over two days, so five hours each day. It explains everything about setting up Workday user security: configuration, security groups, domains, business process security, etc. The agenda was full and the class kept moving.

Sidenote: the format/structure for online courses appears to be the same. You receive a pdf manual a day or two before the course, along with log-in details to *your* tenant, as well as technical details of logging in so that you can test your computer in advance. On course day, you can log in via the pc for both the online course plus voice, or you can log in to view the presentation and dial in separately to the call via phone. I’d say 90-95% of the people used the pc for audio. Overall, there were around 20 or 22 people attending normally.

The structure of the online courses is similar to the classroom training, the instructor walks through a powerpoint, explains the concepts and then you get to work through the exercises in the manual in your tenant.

The good

• no travel costs
• even though it’s online, it’s still a full schedule, similar to what you’d get in a classroom environment. The pricing structure reflects this as well: it’s the same 600 USD per unit, whether it is in-person or online. Sidenote: I noticed that when I took the course in October 2012, it was 8 hours total, they’ve since increased it to 10 hours, so perhaps others found it to be too quick.
• the instructor will stay on an extra 30 min beyond the end of the class on day 1, in case you have questions. As well, this is offered for 30 min before/30 min after on day 2.
• the instructor can log into *your* tenant, so if you have messed up an exercise, they can try and sort you out while people are working on the next one or on a break.

The bad

• there is 30 min at the beginning of day 1 of ‘meet and greet’, similar to if you were in a classroom session. With 20 people saying what their role is, it began to drag a big.
• the instructor has pre-set expectations of how quickly the class should move. Not having the face to face contact perhaps can be an impediment to ‘reading’ if people really understand things.
• In this course, the instructor in addition walked through the exercise before you were unleashed to do the exercise. As an occasional instructor myself, I found that a little odd, to be shown the concepts, an example and then the actual exercise itself, she did it. We then replicated the exact same exercise. So in the back of my head, I wonder if it’s too difficult, the exercises ‘as is’ to be in an online course, as the HCM course I took did not follow this heavy hand-holding.
• scheduling - this one deserves more of a read-out…

I know I start to sound like a broken record here, but Workday’s scheduling is not indicative of a global player. Considering it’s an online course, I would expect a little more flexibility in the offer times, but once again, it’s 9 AM California time or 9 AM New York time, and on a Thurs/Fri rather than other days. For those of us in places around the world, that begins to get old very fast. My security class had a 5 PM start in the UK, so I worked a full day and then got online for another few hours of intense training.

Taking a short look today (Apr 25, 2013), Workday is offering three security sessions in the coming weeks, two in May and one in June. All three of them are on Pacific time, 9 AM-2 PM, although at least on a Mon/Tues or Tues/Wed. Looking at my handy timezone calculator, that looks like the following around the world:

Location	Date	Start	Date	Finish
San Francisco	Thurs Apr 25	9:00 AM	Thurs Apr 25	2:00 PM
London	Thurs Apr 25	5:00 PM	Thurs Apr 25	10:00 PM
Paris	Thurs Apr 25	6:00 PM	Thurs Apr 25	11:00 PM
Singapore	Fri Apr 26	midnight	Fri Apr 26	5:00 AM
Tokyo	Fri Apr 26	1:00 AM	Fri Apr 26	6:00 AM

If you are a US-based company, with only US customers, then that is perfectly fine. But considering that Workday keeps claiming that they are global in nature, I find this to be appalling, in particular when you consider that these are online classes, so they could occasionally put one in a European or Asian timezone, even though that might mean that the instructor is doing odd hours for the two days. For whatever reason, Workday insists on putting everything into the California timezone. OK, timezone rant now over…

Overall though, I’d say the security class was quite good. I’m not sure if you’d need to send your entire team there, or rather, send one person who will bring back the manual. If you have that plus access to a test tenant, you can start to play around with security to understand how it works, while reviewing the manual. In addition, I’d recommend that you check out the Workday Community, a lot of people post questions/issues related to security, and often through reading those, you can get some ideas of pitfalls and how certain setups may make your security maintenance more difficult.