How to build a change-savvy Workday project team

Most Workday implementations don’t fail because of the technology. They fail because of the people.

The system goes live. The training gets delivered. The go-live communications go out. Then adoption stalls.

Employees resist and complain. Managers find workarounds, like continuing to ask HR to do it for them. The help desk is overwhelmed three months post-launch, and leadership is quietly wondering what went wrong.

What went wrong, almost always, is the project team itself. Not in their intentions, but in how they were assembled and led.

Forming-storming-norming-performing

Every team moves through these phases. The question is how fast and whether they ever actually reach performing before the go-live date forces the issue. On a Workday implementation, you don’t get to be slow about it.

Staffing the project team is one of the most consequential decisions a leader makes. I’ve been part of several high-performing project teams across Workday, other ERP implementations, and national digital health launches. I’ve also been called in to stabilize projects where the team dynamic was quietly destroying the outcome before anyone named it.

Here’s what I’ve seen consistently separate the high-performers from the ones that limp to go-live.

Five Attributes of a High-Performing Workday Project Team

1. The client Project Manager is at the center of the PMO

The internal PM is not an administrator. They are the connective tissue between the Governance committee, the implementation partner, and the broader organization. They translate decisions into direction and people into a team.

Every client PM grows during an implementation, sometimes dramatically. Savvy consultants will quickly identify this person’s strengths and actively build their confidence, rather than working around them. The best Workday implementations I’ve been part of had an internal PM who was visibly growing in real time, and a team that was invested in that growth.

2. Change is active, not adjacent

"Change management" that lives in a separate workstream off to the side, reporting into a different track, invited to project meetings as a courtesy doesn’t work. If you've outsourced your change effort to a contractor who's going to send emails and produce PowerPoint decks no one reads, you're not thinking about the significance or importance of this opportunity for your people.

Behavioral science is clear on why: people adopt new behaviors when they feel involved in the process, not informed at the end of it. Reactance, the psychological pushback people experience when change feels imposed, is significantly reduced when employees are engaged throughout, not surprised at go-live.

In a high-performing Workday team, the Change Manager is in PMO meetings. Change readiness is reported alongside system readiness to the Governance committee. Training decisions are made with testing insights, not after them.

If your change activities are happening in isolation, that’s a leading indicator of adoption risk. For more on the behaviors that silently undermine change efforts, see: 5 Ways Leaders Make Change Harder.

3. There is no me, only we

Consulting and a digital transformation program can be deeply task-oriented. Each workstream executes against its own plan, with relationships treated as a bonus, not a baseline. The highest-performing Workday teams I’ve been part of operated differently. Team members understood how their deliverables connected to others’. They leaned in to cover peak periods. They asked questions across workstreams instead of assuming.

This isn’t just a culture preference. The brain’s social architecture, specifically what neuroscientist David Rock describes as relatedness in the SCARF model, means that people working in silos are operating under a low-grade threat response. It shows up as disengagement, self-protection, and slower decisions. Collaboration has to be built into the structure; it won’t emerge on its own.

The project team members who are making decisions as subject matter experts are also gaining the benefit of learning the system early. The project becomes a way for the HR team to begin collaborating differently together, earlier, as a result of their involvement. These professionals then become social proof to their peers. It's an intentional design of a change experience for some of your organization's most important adopters. 

4. Stays firm on what, flexible on how

Scope creep and timeline pressure are facts of life on Workday implementations. What separates high-performing teams is that the what — the vision, the scope, the reason this project exists — remains non-negotiable. The how and sometimes the when require real leadership judgment.

Should you delay go-live? Add hypercare resources? Adjust the amount of policy updates you're attempting to rollout at the same time? These are genuinely hard calls. The best teams have already worked through the options — including the people impacts of each — before they surface at the Governance level. A collaborative PMO brings a recommendation, not just a problem.

Change capacity should always be part of scope and timing decisions. See: How Much Change Can Your Team Actually Handle?.

5. Celebrates and has fun together

Recognition on project teams can feel awkward and sometimes disingenuous when project team members have contributed significantly to a strategically important organizational effort. In organizations where past changes haven’t gone well, being on a project team sometimes carries a reputational risk: people wonder if this is a career detour rather than a career move.

That’s exactly why celebrating wins matters more than it might seem. Behavioral science tells us that positive reinforcement is one of the most reliable drivers of repeated behavior. Recognizing the right behaviors — curiosity, collaboration, candor, resilience —signals to the whole team what success looks like. It also keeps emotional energy tanks full during the long haul between kickoff and go-live. For organizations where culture change is as much a part of the effort as the technology, seeding new behaviors within your project team and then intentionally rewarding them is a critical success factor.

What the change manager is actually doing

The Change Manager on a Workday implementation is doing far more than producing communications and training materials. With AI now handling much of the content production layer of change work, the value of a skilled Change Manager has shifted entirely to the human layer: influence, culture, and readiness. More on that shift: The Influence Stack.

Here’s what that looks like in practice on a Workday project:

• Coaches the client PM to lead with confidence. Early in the project, when ambiguity is high and the PM is presenting to Governance leaders they don’t know well, this can be genuinely terrifying. The Change Manager helps them prepare, debrief, and build the relational capital and credibility they’ll need later on.
• Partners with the PMO to embed change into project deliverables. On Workday projects, this means working with the External PM to build recurring communications and stakeholder engagement into the project plan (implementation partners often omit these). It means partnering with the Testing Lead to make sure the right end users are involved in testing, and that testing insights directly inform training prioritization, especially for transactions with the steepest learning curve. Worksteam leads are also actively involved in testing and leading demos of system functionality along the way. The Change Manager helps coordinate and coach team members to feel confident in doing these (they get easier with practice!)
• Calls out “me vs. we” behavior early. When team dynamics begin to fragment into workstream silos, the Change Manager names it explicitly and gives the client PM the language and examples to address it.
• Informs scope and timeline decisions with people data. Stakeholder change capacity — including the project team’s own capacity — is a legitimate input to go-live decisions. Overlooking it is one of the most common ways leaders make change harder without realizing it. 
• Builds the recognition infrastructure. The Change Manager doesn’t just suggest celebration. They help identify what behaviors are critical to recognize, when, and how. In Governance meetings. In team stand-ups. In 1:1 notes from the sponsor. The behavioral reinforcement has to be consistent to shift team culture and begin practicing new behaviors so that the team has solidified them into habits by the time go-live rolls around.

Across all stakeholders, the Change Manager is also becomes a human sounding board so that the emotions that show up are honored as part of a predictable pattern, rather than becoming quiet sources of change resistance. They help others understand this and have the language and skills to notice and explain emotions as they arise: The Big 4 Emotions of the Change Curve.

Step-by-step: Build your change-savvy Workday project team

1. Step 1: Identify your internal PM. This is your most important hire for the project. Choose someone with the potential to grow into the role visibly, and the resilience to do it under pressure.
2. Step 2: Hire consultants whose skills and styles complement your internal PM. Three key roles to get right: External PM, Change Manager, and Testing Lead. Complementary, not just technically capable. Supplement with specialists along the way or other supports to help your internal team maximize the growth opportunity.
3. Step 3: Stay positive and patient during the forming and storming phases. Correct quietly in 1:1 conversations; stay publicly steady as the team finds its footing. Hold back from solving everything for the team. Issue resolution is an important collaborative exercise every project team needs to master, quickly.
4. Step 4: Design collaboration into the structure. Don’t expect it to emerge. Does the PMO use “we” language in updates? Do workstream leads understand their dependencies on each other?
5. Step 5: Meet regularly 1-1 with your internal PM to assess their growth, the team culture, and any resource adjustments needed. This conversation is as important as any Governance meeting.
6. Step 6: Make people considerations a formal input to any scope or timing decision. Not an afterthought. How much additional workload can your project team take on without breaking? Where are the friction points in the changes for key stakeholder groups, and how can you make them easier?
7. Step 7: Recognize and celebrate relentlessly. Know who is working hard. Name it specifically. In Governance meetings, in team standups, in direct messages. Encouragement is not a soft skill. It’s a behavioral lever.

Update note, May 2026: This post was originally published in October 2022 as a general guide to change-savvy project teams. It has been updated to focus specifically on Workday implementations and to include behavioral science research on reactance, the SCARF model, and positive reinforcement as the foundation for the leadership practices described.

Leading a Workday Implementation for the first time?

If you’re a program sponsor about to sign off on a multi-million dollar Workday investment, or an internal change lead stepping into a deployment more complex than anything you’ve navigated before, you’re in the right place.

The changecapable Leadership Program is a focused fall cohort for 25 leaders. Think of it as the lightweight insurance policy that protects a much larger organizational bet: the behavioral science foundation that keeps your implementation from delivering on time and on budget, only to stall at adoption.

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Kris Jennings is an organizational change expert with 30 years of experience leading transformations inside and for large organizations. She developed the changecapable method, a behavioral science approach to change that delivers higher adoption. She works with enterprise organizations navigating digital transformation, ERP implementations, and large-scale change.