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Client overview
A leading international law firm known for advising major global organisations on complex, high-value transactions and critical legal matters.
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Overview
Our client, one of the world’s leading international law firms and one of the UK ‘Magic Circle’ firms, invested in transforming its internal HR operations to better support its growing and increasingly technology-driven workforce. This includes adopting Workday as a unified cloud platform to streamline HR processes, enhance data accuracy, and strengthen employee experience. The transformation required a rigorous testing programme to ensure Workday met the firm’s high standards for reliability, compliance, and performance across recruitment, talent, learning, and core HR operations.
Engagement
A key part of the Workday implementation was to replace SelectHR, the firm’s long-standing HR platform. While SelectHR had served the firm for several years, it had become increasingly limited in its ability to support modern HR processes, data visibility requirements, and the firm’s growing need for integrated, cloud-based functionality. As part of the transition, new challenges emerged around process redesign, data migration, and end-to-end validation of the Workday solution.
The shift from a familiar legacy system to an entirely new HR platform introduced significant testing demands. Workday would become the single source of truth for employee data, recruitment, talent, absence, and other core HR functions, meaning every workflow, integration, and data pathway had to be thoroughly verified. With SelectHR being phased out, there was no option for parallel reliance, increasing the importance of a good-quality testing regimen to help assure the migration and limit risk.
When planning the migration, the firm quickly realised there were substantial resourcing constraints. Their HR and IT teams were already fully engaged in business-as-usual commitments, including ongoing people operations, annual HR cycles, and several internal change initiatives. This left minimal internal capacity to plan, execute, and govern the extensive Acceptance Testing programme needed for the Workday implementation.
The internal test capability was further stretched by other firmwide priorities, leaving no dedicated in-house resource to manage the structured testing effort required to validate a full system replacement. The testing scope expanded significantly, not only functional and user acceptance testing, but also regression testing, data validation, integration testing, and process verification across the entire employee lifecycle.
As the firm’s testing partner, they were able to turn to Prolifics to provide the expertise, structure, and independence required to ensure the Workday solution fully met the firm’s operational, data, and compliance needs before retiring SelectHR.
Solution
To support the transformation, Prolifics Testing provided a structured, expert-led testing service tailored to the complexities of the transformation. Prolifics Testing assigned an experienced Senior Test Consultant to lead the engagement, beginning with a thorough scoping exercise to understand the revised system landscape, the firm’s HR processes, and the critical risks introduced by the full system replacement.
During this discovery phase, the Prolifics Consultant engaged closely with HR SMEs, IT, and programme stakeholders to define clear testing responsibilities, establish alignment across teams, and ensure buy-in for the overall testing approach. This collaborative process enabled all parties to adopt a unified view of the testing objectives, coverage, and success criteria needed to ensure Workday was fully validated prior to go-live.
Based on this analysis, Prolifics designed a comprehensive Test Strategy that addressed every stage of assurance required for a major HR platform implementation. The strategy outlined structured phases covering:
System Testing – validating Workday configurations, workflows, security roles, and core functionality
End-to-End (E2E) Testing – confirming that HR lifecycle processes performed seamlessly across departments and mirrored real operational scenarios
Once the strategy was approved, Prolifics delivered the testing activities as a managed service, providing flexible specialist resources that could adapt to the evolving demands of the programme. This approach ensured consistent quality oversight, rigorous testing execution, and efficient issue resolution, while enabling the firm’s internal teams to focus on business-as-usual operations and organisational change management.
Through this structured and collaborative approach, Prolifics Testing helped ensure the implementation of Workday was robust, reliable, and fully aligned with the firm’s operational and strategic HR requirements.
Prolifics conducted comprehensive end-to-end testing across core Workday functional areas, covering Workday modules spanning HCM, Absence, and Onboarding, by deeply analysing company policies, workbooks, and functional trackers. This in-depth testing effort validated essential business processes, from worker onboarding to job changes and then managing absence. All defects identified during System Integration Testing (SIT) were thoroughly logged on Azure DevOps and resolved, enabling a smooth transition into User Acceptance Testing (UAT) with full stakeholder confidence.
These tests ensured Workday could support peak-period activity without degradation, validating both scalability and reliability, supporting a seamless go-live without issues in the production environment.
This successful outcome showcases Prolifics Testing’s ability to deliver accurate, efficient, and high-quality Workday testing services under demanding timelines, ensuring robust system performance and business continuity.
