HR Workday Governance, Integration & Enablement Lead

NielsenIQ•Chicago, IL

1d•Remote

About The Position

This role is pivotal in defining and managing the operational framework for Workday-related activities across the HR function. It serves as the critical link between HR Centers of Excellence (COEs) and HR Technology, ensuring that business needs are accurately translated into actionable requirements. The Lead is responsible for overseeing the Workday roadmap, prioritizing initiatives, managing interdependencies, and aligning Workday investments with HR's strategic objectives and available capacity. A key aspect of the role involves establishing and maintaining consistent processes for Workday change requests, from initial intake and assessment to prioritization and delivery. This includes defining work categories, setting required artifacts, clarifying ownership, and streamlining delivery paths. The position also involves designing and facilitating various stakeholder forums to ensure alignment among HR COEs, HR Tech, and senior leadership. Furthermore, the role focuses on building Workday capability within COEs through templates, toolkits, coaching, and staying current with Workday's product roadmap. It acts as the primary integration point between HR and HR Tech, ensuring clear communication, defined responsibilities, and addressing process friction. Finally, the Lead is instrumental in change management and enhancing user experience, maintaining a centralized information hub, providing communication templates, establishing user experience principles, and tracking Workday usage metrics to drive continuous improvement.

Requirements

Hands-on Workday experience across multiple modules (e.g. Core HCM, Recruiting, Compensation, Absence, Reporting) — able to engage substantively in requirements and design conversations.
Experience running governance or program management processes in a complex HR or HR Tech environment, including facilitating decisions with senior stakeholders.
Proven ability to work across organizational boundaries — bringing together HR, HR Tech, and business stakeholders with different priorities, and producing decisions rather than just discussions.
Comfortable operating without direct authority — able to influence and hold people to process through relationships and credibility.
Familiarity with product management principles: defining problems before solutions, measuring outcomes not just outputs, and iterating based on user feedback.
Knowledge of Workday’s release cycle and product roadmap, with the ability to assess how upcoming features may affect HR’s plans.

Responsibilities

Owns the consolidated cross-HR Workday roadmap — the single integrated view across all COE module roadmaps.
Works with COE System Leads and HR Tech to sequence initiatives against capacity and technical constraints, surface interdependencies, and facilitate prioritization decisions when conflicts arise.
Meets bi-weekly with COE System Leads to review priorities, incorporating new requests and changes to capacity or technical constraints.
Surfaces interdependencies across COEs — for example, where a Recruiting change affects Pre-boarding, or a Core HCM data change has downstream impacts on Reporting.
Prepares clear trade-off options when competing priorities arise, facilitating decisions and ensuring outcomes are documented in the roadmap.
Owns the end-to-end process by which Workday change requests are submitted, assessed, and prioritized — from initial intake through to a decision on whether and when work proceeds.
Maintains a standardized intake template grounded in problem definition, impacted users, business goals, and success measures — moving the conversation from ‘what we want to build’ to ‘what problem we are solving and for whom’.
Facilitates a monthly governance forum with CHRO, COE leaders, and HR Tech leadership to review roadmap status and make prioritization decisions.
Tracks adherence to the intake process and ensures smaller enhancements move through the system efficiently rather than sitting in backlogs.
Establishes clear categories of work — major initiatives, enhancements, break/fix, and BAU — with agreed criteria for how each is handled, resourced, and tracked.
Sets required artefacts at each stage: a business requirements brief before any build begins; a test plan with defined owners before any deployment.
Defines ownership across HR and HR Tech at every handoff point, so nothing falls between teams.
Simplifies delivery paths for lower-risk enhancements without compromising quality; introduces consistent sizing practices so estimates are reliable.
Designs and runs recurring forums to keep HR COEs, HR Tech, and senior leadership aligned on priorities, progress, and decisions.
Provides COEs with templates and toolkits for process mapping, role matrices, and workflow documentation.
Contributes practical input during design sessions on what Workday can and cannot do natively — helping COE System Leads sense-check designs and avoid unnecessary custom configuration.
Works with COE System Leads to sharpen requirements briefs from high-level business needs into something specific enough for HR Tech to size and scope.
Runs coaching sessions on requirements writing, test planning, and Workday’s data model; stays current on Workday’s product roadmap and brings recommendations to governance.
Serves as the primary connection point between HR COEs and HR Tech — ensuring needs are clearly understood on both sides.
Maintains clear boundaries between HR responsibilities (requirements, UAT, change management) and HR Tech responsibilities (configuration, technical design, deployment).
Identifies and addresses process friction on both sides of the relationship, advocating for improvements wherever they are needed.
Maintains a centralized Workday SharePoint site covering roadmap status, ways of working guidance, job aids, and release updates.
Provides COEs with standardized templates for change management, training, and communications.
Establishes user experience principles ensuring configuration decisions prioritize usability for employees, managers, and HR teams.
Tracks Workday usage metrics and NPS, sharing insights to identify where features are underused or further enablement is needed.