Think it's too hard to deploy Workday in the public sector? Nope, it isn’t.

Public sector Workday projects are a completely different beast to their private sector cousins. The software is basically the same, but the environment it’s being used in isn’t.

Regulators, arms length bodies and non departmental public bodies carry a level of scrutiny, governance and workforce complexity that many commercial rollouts simply never run into. You can nail the technical configuration and still watch a project stall because nobody managed the stakeholders properly. Or you can nail the change management and skip the data cleansing, and end up carrying years of legacy mess straight into your shiny new system.

A quick note on where we’re coming from, and why Scrumconnect has real skin in the game. We’re a certified Workday implementation and AMS partner for public and private sector. We also have a deep understanding of how the UK public sector works because we are currently involved in over 20% of the UK’s most significant citizen facing public services. And lastly, we use Workday as our own ERP, so we understand real-world use cases, integration options, and the operational decisions that shape long-term value. 

All in all, this means we know how to successfully deliver Workday in the public sector, run it, and evolve it in practice.

Stop viewing governance as a point of friction and start seeing it as your operating context

In a private company, a steering committee typically waves something through as the project moves on. In a regulator or a non-departmental public body (NDPB), you're usually working inside a stack of governance that might include an executive committee, a board, remuneration or HR committees, oversight from a sponsoring government department, and sometimes Cabinet Office scrutiny if the spend is significant enough. 

Any one of these can throw in a checkpoint and complexity that a private sector team would rarely have to face.

The best approach we've found is to treat every governance touchpoint as a proper milestone in the plan, not admin bolted onto the end of a phase. Map out every committee with a stake in the outcome right at the start. Learn their meeting cadence then build your decision points around that cadence, not the other way round. Few things kill momentum like finding out three weeks before go live that a compensation change needs committee sign off, and that the committee won’t meet again for six weeks.

Pay and grading need political sensitivity, not just technical mapping

Public sector bodies often run on pay frameworks, spinal points and grading structures that have been around for many decades, far longer than any HR system. 

So when you bring in Workday's compensation and job profile setup, you're not just mapping data across, you're potentially exposing years of inconsistency in how grading has actually been applied. 

In an organisation funded through industry levies, or one operating under public sector pay restraint, any perceived change to pay or grading can very quickly manifest into a story well beyond HR and IT

Our advice is to run a job architecture exercise early, alongside the technical design rather than after it, and to give it a proper sponsor of its own rather than treating it as a subtask of the HR system build. Be honest with stakeholders, unions and staff about what's actually changing versus what's simply being moved to a new platform. Nothing kills trust faster than staff suspecting a digital transformation programme is cover for a quiet pay review.

Added to this, many public bodies and regulators have recognised trade unions, commonly Prospect, PCS or Unison depending on the sector, with formal consultation rights written into recognition agreements. This isn't a group you communicate to through a change newsletter. It's a formal negotiating relationship with statutory and contractual weight behind it.

A few things matter here. Bring recognised unions into the conversation at the design stage, not at user testing, because retrofitting union consultation into a nearly finished build is where timelines go to die. 

Be really clear, in writing, about what's a pure system change (like a new interface for booking leave) versus what actually touches terms and conditions (maybe the way that overtime would be calculated). 

Transparency is key, so view unions as important stakeholders, giving them genuine hands-on access to a test environment rather than relying on your description of it. Letting them see and try the system for themselves so the heat is taken out of the delivery, allowing for changes to be made constructively and iteratively. 

This is one of the places where an experienced partner like Scrumconnect earns its keep. Our own delivery model runs across three ongoing phases, build, run and enhance, which means that engagement doesn't just stop at go live. Configuration and data work happens in build, proactive monitoring and issue resolution happens in run, and ongoing training and best practice guidance happens in enhance. 

For a unionised environment, that continuity is worth a lot. Reps and staff get a consistent point of contact through implementation and out the other side, rather than a delivery team that vanishes the week after cutover.

Legacy data is always messier than it looks

Departments are frequently the product of mergers, renames, or functions transferred in from elsewhere in government. That history lives on in the HR data. It’s everything from TUPE transfers, pension schemes, and long deprecated job grades. Before you know it, what looks like a simple data migration can end up uncovering decades of undocumented exceptions.

Allow more time for data cleansing and validation than you would on a comparable private sector project of the same size. Bring long serving HR and payroll staff who hold knowledge into the programme, because often the only people who can tell you why one particular group has an odd pension flag attached to their record. 

This is exactly the kind of problem a dedicated data capability is built to solve, assessing, cleansing and migrating legacy data with clear ownership and quality standards before going live. It makes sure that these exceptions are found and resolved during design rather than discovered post-go-live.

Scrutiny shapes how you justify the project

Public bodies, especially ones funded through statutory levies, licence fees or government grants, live under permanent scrutiny over whether their technology spend represents value for money. 

That scrutiny might come from the National Audit Office, a parliamentary committee or a sponsoring department. 

So be prepared to defend for every module, every integration, every day of consultancy time you procure. To navigate this, you could build the value for money case into the business case from the very start, with clear and quantifiable benefits such as efficiency savings, fewer errors and better audit readiness, rather than vague language about digital transformation. 

Not only is this good practice, but it protects the project the moment that budgets get tight and someone starts looking for an easy target.

Why an experienced Workday partner changes the risk profile

None of this is unique to Workday as a platform. But ERP projects inside regulated public bodies tend to bring all five of these challenges together at once, on a tight timeline, with real political and financial consequences if they go wrong. 

That's the gap Scrumconnect closes. As a certified Workday implementation and AMS partner with a dedicated Workday centre of excellence, we support the whole lifecycle, from early strategy and readiness through configuration, data migration, testing and cutover, right through to long term run and enhance support once the system is live. 

Because we run Workday internally ourselves, our teams understand how early configuration choices actually play out in daily operation, not just how they look on paper.

For organisations without deep Workday expertise already in house, having implementation and ongoing support under one roof cuts down a lot of the handover risk that often trips up public sector projects. That's the gap between the system working on the day it goes live, and the system still working, and staff still trusting it, eighteen months later.

If you're a public body weighing up how to resource a Workday deployment, whether that's building from scratch, stabilising a rollout that's already underway, or picking up ongoing support for a system that's already live, our Workday team works across strategy, build and long term support, with the public sector context built in from the start rather than added on afterwards.

On the journey as CFO or CHRO? Here’re a few tips to help you along. 

• Map your governance before you map your project plan. Identify every committee, every sign off, every consultation right that touches this project before you commit to a go live date.
• Put one senior person in charge of stakeholders engagement, separate from the technical project lead. Change management in a publicly scrutinised organisation is a full time job on its own, not something you tack onto programme management.
• Treat job architecture and pay transparency as a joint exercise between HR and finance from week one. Don't let compensation mapping turn up as a surprise late in the build.
• Set aside real time for data cleansing, at least as much as you would in the private sector, plus some contingency for the historical anomalies you will find.
• Write your value for money case in the language of your external scrutiny body, not just your internal sponsor. If you can defend the investment to an external auditor or a select committee in plain terms, you can defend it to anyone internally.

Workday can genuinely transform how a public sector body runs. But only if the deployment respects the governance, the workforce relationships and the scrutiny these organisations live under every day. The technology is rarely the hard part, the people, the process and the politics around it are where these projects are actually won or lost. So, think it's too hard to deploy Workday in the public sector? Nope, it isn’t.