This is a story about how SaaS has completely tipped on its head the preconceived notions of enterprise software implementations, even for veteran consultants like me. Put another way, it’s a story of new school v. old school.
Workday — for whom we’re an implementation partner and a customer — introduced a delivery group called the Solution Center. This team takes a 
customer from scratch to go-live in as little as month (average deployment timeframe is an unbelievable 90 days). Even though that premise is astonishingly powerful, one needs to understand – truly understand – how radically different this approach is from the mainstay ERP mentality.
The Workday Solution Center leverages Workday’s Rapid Application Deployment [PDF link] approach, something we’ve embraced here at MIPRO as a result of being a Workday customer. The mantra of this approach is deploy, optimize and extend. Each deployment starts by leveraging a rapid prototype. This first model is designed to handle the core requirements of the customer and help them achieve quick time-to-value.
The idea behind the Solution Center team is to utilize the Rapid Application Deployment model in a centralized and structured manner. Think of the Solution Center as a turn-key delivery approach. The Solution Center team works to construct a rapid prototype in about a week, using the best available data they can get from the client (reports, data files, etc.). It doesn’t have to be perfect, just something to show the client’s data in the tenant. This rapid prototype, this foundation, is what they will use at the initial kick-off.
This approach is very data-focused. The customer has to accept the Solution Center-tuned set of optimized business processes, and if for whatever reason they insist on modifying them, they are responsible for the configuration work. All the implementer does is load data. It’s streamlined and clean.
This approach encourages clients to go-live quickly and focus on incremental configuration of the full-on Workday solution. It places a premium on cost containment and quick time-to-value. Isn’t that one of the primary promises of on-demand computing?
That’s the new school.
From a personal standpoint, I come from the old school: given my financials background, I’m accustomed to premeditation, logic and OCD-grade project order. I have not “grown up” with this new rapid prototype methodology, and as a result it was a major departure from what I was used to. I learned that it has a fantastic success rate and have come to believe emphatically that it’s a necessary tool in the SaaS toolkit. Now that I’ve worked with Workday extensively, I understand this approach far more than I did when it was first unveiled.
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This difference has nothing to do with the software platform, merely an approach to implementation and a customers acceptance of it. At ROC we have been following a similar approach with SAP for a number of years now and have had enourmous success doing so.
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