About Myself:

Hello, I am Aman Mathur (the person on the right of the picture), an integration associate manager at Kognitiv. I’ve spent about 9 years in the Workday ecosystem. In these 9 years, I got an opportunity to be an implementer for 6 years, a Workday support consultant for 2 years and now being an advisory consultant for the past year.

During my initial years with Workday, I specialized in the integrations domain and was certified into Workday HCM, Integrations, and Advanced integrations like, Studio, CCB and CCTPP.  I got the opportunity to work with some great colleagues at the organizations where I worked, as well as the client team counterparts. I did several implementations for customers in the APAC, EU and NA regions for about 6 years and then one fine day I decided to actually explore how things look on the other side, at a client or a non partner and luckily I stumbled upon Kognitiv and the journey then began.

My journey at KOG:

Believe it or not, at the very beginning of my career at Kognitiv, I was a bit skeptical about how things would turn out for me. Have I made the right decision? Is it really what I think I could do and should do? Trust me, that speculation went away very quickly. As Nelson Mandela once said, “May your choices reflect your hopes, not your fears,” which helps to explain my decision in moving forward.

I started as a Senior Consultant in our traditional Post Production Support (PPS) integrations team and worked there for about a year and a half. PPS was fun, as I started looking at Workday and integrations from a customer’s point of view rather than an implementer’s, which actually made a huge difference. I learnt several nuances of integrations here at Kognitiv, that I somehow missed or did not learn while being an implementer. Things were going well on the PPS side, when one day Luke announced the setup of our Mini Advisory Services team led by Laura Oldham. I read the job description, it sounded exciting and I talked to my manager & the leadership team on the PPS side, and I was moved into our new services offering called “Workday Advisory Services”. I was truly excited as I loved the opportunity to re-join the implementation side of Workday.

Advisory services from an integrations POV:

My journey in Advisory services kicked off just less than a year ago and I think this entire service line is close to my heart (I love what I do and that's what you call passion in work!). As part of the integrations advisory team, I have been helping clients who are undergoing a Workday implementation to make the right decisions in terms of their integration approach, integration strategy and the overall integration testing to E2E and deployment.

When I started putting myself into the clients’ shoes I realized how difficult a simple looking Workday implementation could be for a customer (trust me, I never thought about it while being an implementer or a PPS consultant myself). I have seen challenges with clients understanding the entire terminology & concepts in Workday, where I, as an advisory team member, help them overcome all the hurdles in a structured and orderly fashion. 

I have seen them overcoming key caveats using our advisory services, thorough documentation, effective testing strategy, and a detailed knowledge transfer to ensure that it’s a smooth ride post-go live and that there are no surprises later.

The end to end testing cycles have been the most challenging sprint in any of the “advisory” projects I have been involved in. Usually, clients do not have any idea of what's going on in an integration, unless they really see it in action while completing the end to end  testing. Getting involved in the end to end testing is not only exciting but it's extremely challenging at the same time, for the client, of course! Since the client teams are stretched thin, it is people like us in the advisory space who jump in and talk to all the functional teams, and structure the integrations end to end testing in an orderly fashion. 

Mind you, one little mistake of forgetting an integration test scenario that’s essential for a client can truly mess up the go live and leave the client in jitters. We make it a point to talk with each functional advisory team member along with the client, show them the integration test scenarios and figure out what's not working, what's useful and what are the corner cases that the integration testing tracker is missing.

Now, when everything is in order, it's time to test. As testing begins, you uncover the loopholes in the integrations and that is when testing becomes extremely important. The implementer fixes the gap, we retest and another loophole is usually discovered.

We at Kognitiv, ensure to keep the time of three testing cycles open, to ensure that what's been developed by the implementer is tested several times (recurringly) and then moved to production once everyone is happy. It is the onus on us to ensure that the client goes live successfully and does not face any mishaps soon after going live. 

Yet another challenging part on the “advisory” side is the knowledge transfer. Once a client goes live with Workday, they are going to lose their implementation support and it's critical for them and their team to understand the integration functionality well, along with what Workday is doing behind the scenes. It is essential to teach the client about commonly occurring errors, glitches etc, and how to deal with them. I take care of that as part of my current role. I put together effective documentation for the clients, along with flow diagrams, some screenshots and almost all the information essential for them to look for when they are stuck (at least) at the very beginning of the problem. The first level of action as you may call. 

Lastly, I would say that being on the advisory team is one of the best places to be. It is like an army of people who help prepare the soldiers for an upcoming war (pun intended). What makes advisory services unique is the “advisory consultants” themselves who’ve actually tested the waters of being an implementer, a client and a PPS consultant and they know what’s critical for the client and what are the essential elements to make them happy. After all, a happy client makes a happy Kognitiv!