Read time: 5 minutes

Hey there! Mia here. Something exciting happened in the Workday world over a week ago now 🤓

Any guesses? You’ve probably heard…

2024R2 features hit your Preview tenant!

Ready or not, it’s time to dig into Workday’s Release Notes with full force…

If you pull the 2024R2 Release Notes today*, you’ll find a whopping 1,117 items to review.

That’s a lot to digest and comprehend within a 5-week testing window 😳

And if you and/or your team are attending Workday Rising the week before the September 21 release delivery date? 😮‍💨 YEESH!

BUT! Here’s the truth…

A high-level understanding of what 2024R2 is made up of will reduce a lot (if not most) of the release-induced overwhelm you and your team may feel.

Which is why I’m sharing an analysis of what’s inside Workday’s 2024 Release 2!

To create this breakdown, I put my data analyst hat on 🤠 and took to Excel…

I analyzed hundreds of Release Notes and spliced them up by type, date added, product area, and setup effort, creating visuals along the way to illustrate 2024R2’s data story.

In all my Workday releases, I’ve never seen anything quite like this breakdown—so I’m super excited to share it with you! Without further ado, let’s get to it 😎

Workday buckets each release note into 1 of the 4 following “Release Note Types”…

As I mentioned, today* the 2024R2 Release Notes include 1,117 items. Here they are, broken out by type…

Seeing this chart, I breathe a sigh of relief 😅 Out of the 1,117 Release Notes, just under 40% (443) are features that will require thorough review and testing. Phew!

Regarding features, another metric I found helpful is the date that the feature was added to the Release Notes on Community…

From this graph, we can see that Workday added the majority of 2024R2 features to the Release Notes on August 7th. However, a good handful rolled in later on, illustrating the importance of regularly revisiting the Release Notes for updates.

I recommend checking the Release Notes weekly or more during the 4 - 5 weeks leading up to the Preview testing window. Add new items to your test document as you go, and you’ll be in good shape come time to test!

Now let’s get into the meat of 2024R2…

Workday’s Release Notes (and the What’s New in Workday report) don’t categorize items by broad product areas that most of us are familiar with. So, to help contextualize what’s included in 2024R2, I bucketed all 1,117 items into 18 more easily digestible product areas…

I categorized each item based on both the Products listed on the item, and the prefix of the primary JIRA ticket associated with the item. I made case-by-case judgement calls as needed for items associated with multiple product areas.

Here are the results…

2024R2 features broken out by product area! I find this view pretty helpful.

Immediately, you can see where Workday focused its product development this release. The Financials, Student, and Payroll products got the most love, together making up just under HALF (46%) of all 2024R2 features.

With this view, you also glean what percentage of the features are relevant to you. For instance, if your organization doesn’t use Workday Student, you can remove 68 features (over 15% of all features!) from your test list.

Seeing features by product area also helps you gauge the workload each of your product area owners will bear during testing. This release, your Financials team has a lot to get through! Meanwhile, it’ll be an easy breezy release for your Integrations squad.

Curious to know which product areas Workday is fixing most this release? I was! Let’s check it out…

Again, we see that Workday heavily invested in its Student and Financials products this release—nearly 65% of its fixes are for these areas. Happy news if your organization is utilizing these modules!

In my analysis, Retirements by product area follow a similar trend. Student, Financials, and Core HCM account for about 55% (16, 7, and 7 out of 54, respectively) of this release’s retiring items, as of today*.

And to pull it all together…

2024R2 items by type and product area! Within each product area, we get a sense of the proportion of fixes, features, retirements, and coming soon items.

This may be the most important release feature variable to assess…

Setup effort! Does the feature require setup or opt-in, or is it automatically available? Here’s the breakdown for 2024R2 👇

Sweet! Well over half of the features this release are automatically available. Just over 43% require setup or opt-in, and just 3 features require you seek professional services support for implementation.

Setup effort impacts your test strategy. If a feature is automatically available, testing it is a higher priority since you can’t control if/when it goes into Production. When a feature requires setup or opt-in, you have leeway to tailor test prioritization to your organization.

And one last visualization to sum up your summation of the release 😜…

With this graph, we’ve got eyes on exactly how many features require setup or opt-in within each product area. Again, this view helps you gauge the workload each product area owner has on their plate this release in greater detail.

📊 📊 📊

Seeing the release summarized and broken down from these different angles helps me wrap my head around where Workday is taking its products—and consequently, where Workday is taking us.

My hope is that this breakdown was both fun and interesting, and gives you and your team a solid understanding of what 2024R2 actually consists of!

In this week’s newsletter, we’ll dive deeper into 2024R2 with technical breakdowns of the features we are MOST excited for. Stay tuned! 💃🏻

*As of September 4th, 2024.

As always, thank you for reading!

We’re celebrating you and your pursuit of a Well Built Workday 🥳

Until next time!

Ceci & Mia

Co-Founders of Well Built Solutions