We recently completed a major succession planning data migration from our legacy HRIS to Workday R1 2024. The project took 4 months and involved migrating 8 years of historical succession data for 12,000 employees across 45 business units. I wanted to share our experience and lessons learned for anyone tackling similar migrations.
Our scope included succession pools, talent profiles, readiness assessments, development plans, and historical position assignments. We used Workday Studio extensively for custom data transformations and validation logic. The biggest challenges were around data mapping inconsistencies between legacy and Workday structures, validation rules that flagged edge cases we hadn’t anticipated, and maintaining historical data integrity while adapting to Workday’s temporal data model.
Key success factors: thorough data profiling upfront, phased migration approach by business unit, and extensive stakeholder validation sessions. Happy to discuss specifics around any aspect of the migration.
Also curious about your phased approach - did you migrate by business unit or by data entity type? We’re debating whether to do a big-bang cutover or phase it, but worried about maintaining dual systems during transition.
Absolutely, competency mapping was one of our biggest hurdles. Our legacy system had 400+ competencies with inconsistent naming and overlapping definitions. We had to consolidate to 120 Workday-aligned competencies. The approach: created a mapping matrix with legacy-to-Workday competency relationships (1:1, many:1, 1:many). Used Workday Studio to apply transformation rules during load. For employees with legacy competencies that mapped to multiple Workday competencies, we preserved the relationship in a custom field for reference. Critical lesson: involve HR business partners early in the mapping exercise - they know the nuances that pure technical mapping misses. We ran three rounds of stakeholder reviews before finalizing the taxonomy.
Validation was definitely tricky. We encountered three main categories of issues. First, business process validations that were appropriate for new entries but too strict for historical data - like requiring development plan completion dates that didn’t exist in legacy. Second, referential integrity challenges where succession plan participants referenced positions that had been restructured. Third, temporal validation issues where effective dates in legacy didn’t align with Workday’s event-based model. Our solution involved creating a staging validation layer in Workday Studio that pre-checked data against Workday rules, flagged exceptions, and applied corrective logic where possible. For edge cases that couldn’t be auto-corrected, we generated exception reports for manual review. We also worked with Workday support to temporarily relax certain validation rules during migration, then re-enabled them post-cutover.