The Post-Go-Live Reality
The excitement of a Workday go-live is often followed by an unexpected challenge: sustaining the system effectively. While implementation partners excel at getting organisations to Day One, the “Day Two and beyond” reality looks very different.
According to Workday’s 2025 Global State of Skills survey, 51% of business leaders are concerned about future talent shortages, and only 32% are confident their teams have the skills to sustain long-term success.
Adding to this, PwC’s 2023 Cloud Survey revealed that over 50% of Workday customers encounter skill-related support issues in the first 12 months post-go-live, and the problem becomes clear: internal expertise often isn’t built to last.
The challenge is technical as well as operational. Internal teams are tasked with balancing business requests, security, compliance, payroll, reporting, and quarterly release testing, often without structured post-deployment training or backup capacity. The result: burnout, inefficiencies, and slowed innovation.
What Skill Gaps Actually Look Like
Skill gaps don’t always show up as dramatic system failures; they creep in quietly, often disguised as “business as usual.” Some common red flags include:
- Repeating fixes: The same tickets are logged every cycle, with no root-cause resolution.
- Slow resolutions: Issues linger because the internal admin is stretched thin or unavailable.
- Testing paralysis: No clear owner for regression testing leads to missed errors in production.
- Release anxiety: Quarterly updates bring more stress than benefits, with delayed adoption of new features.
- Limited optimisation: New Workday capabilities (like VNDLY integration or Adaptive Planning enhancements) remain unused because teams lack the bandwidth to explore them.
These symptoms collectively slow operations, frustrate end-users, and reduce Workday’s ROI.
Why Internal Teams Aren’t Always Equipped for AMS
There’s a structural reason skill gaps persist. Internal teams are often small, covering multiple systems and processes beyond Workday. With limited bandwidth, they focus on keeping operations running (like payroll, compliance, and employee support) while AMS partners are built specifically to provide dedicated, specialized Workday expertise.
- Implementation ≠ Operations: Partners focus on design and deployment, but sustaining Workday requires different expertise, configuration governance, integration monitoring, security reviews, and analytics.
- Limited post-go-live training: According to Deloitte’s 2025 Global Human Capital Trends, 66% of managers and executives say that most recent hires are not fully prepared, and lack of experience is the most common failing.
- Overreliance on individuals: Knowledge is often concentrated in one or two technical specialists. If they leave, capacity and institutional knowledge vanish.
- Reactive support model: Teams spend most of their time firefighting instead of optimising.
In short, most organisations were never set up to run Workday like a continuously evolving platform, which is exactly what it is.
The Cost of Ignoring the Gaps
Failing to address these gaps carries real, measurable costs:
- Employee burnout: Gartner’s Digital Workplace Survey 2024 reported that 47% of IT and HR platform owners cite burnout as their top challenge in managing SaaS systems.
- Update failures: A poorly tested release can disrupt payroll, compliance, or reporting, creating reputational and regulatory risks.
- Underutilization: Workday releases ≈500 new features each year, yet many organisations adopt only a fraction. Without proactive testing and exploration, updates often go unused, limiting ROI and innovation.
- Financial impact: Manual fixes, overtime, and delayed adoption can cost organisations hundreds of thousands in hidden productivity losses annually.
Skill gaps are operational headaches that erode ROI and trust in the platform.
How AMS Fills the Gap
Workday AMS (Application Management Services) is designed to bridge exactly these operational gaps. Unlike ad-hoc support, AMS provides structured, proactive, and continuous care for your Workday ecosystem.
Here’s how AMS strengthens internal capability:
- Proactive Monitoring & Triage: Issues are resolved before they escalate, lting in reduced downtime. AMS-supported teams resolve Workday issues faster.
- Structured Release Governance: Each quarterly release is impact-assessed, regression-tested, and deployed with confidence, avoiding costly surprises.
- Scalable Expertise: AMS provides a bench of certified specialists (HCM, FIN, Payroll, Reporting, Prism, Adaptive) that a single internal admin cannot replicate.
- Documentation & Knowledge Transfer: Every ticket, fix, and configuration is logged, building institutional knowledge instead of hoarding it with one SME (Subject Matter Expert).
- Continuous Optimisation: Beyond fixes, AMS introduces process improvements, automation, and best practices aligned with evolving Workday features.
This combination fills current gaps and future-proofs operations.
Build a More Confident Workday Team
Skill gaps are an inevitable byproduct of a fast-evolving SaaS ecosystem. The organisations that thrive with Workday are those that recognise when internal bandwidth is maxed out and partner strategically.
Workday AMS enables you to:
- Prevent operational disruption
- Reduce hidden costs of inefficiency
- Unlock the full ROI of Workday features
- Build team confidence and reduce burnout
The question isn’t whether skill gaps exist; it’s whether you’ll close them before they disrupt your operations.
5 Red Flags That Your Workday Isn’t Being Managed Effectively
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