Sam Spector, SVP Professional Services, OneSource Virtual

Sam Spector is the newest member of the OneSource Virtual (OSV) leadership team.  He recently joined OSV, an exclusive Workday partner which offers end-to-end services for customers, to lead the Professional Services organization.  He is no stranger to the Workday partner ecosystem, and previously helped to build and grow Meteorix from its inception through its acquisition by IBM until just recently.  I spoke with him to gain his perspective on critical factors in the successful delivery of projects as well as the partner selection process.

What makes Workday projects successful?

It’s all about the team–no doubt about it.  From the consulting side, it’s important to have people on the project with strong, functional backgrounds, as well as a deep understanding of Workday.  Workday is a journey, not a destination–and deployment is just one step in the process.  Having an experienced team and partner that can work with you from Phase Zero and beyond makes all the difference.  Workday has standard project methodology–and all the partners do a lot of the same thing.  What makes a difference is the quality of the team and customer-centrality of the partner organization you select.

Given people make the difference, what are the most important attributes you look for when you hire Professional Services associates?
1.  Passion around the power of the Workday product & a deep understanding of how the product works.
2.  Soft consulting skills and people who are intelligent, collaborative and transparent with customers.
3.  People who are able to identify and tie the software solution with business outcomes.

It’s a competitive environment for Workday resources–and the pool is small.  Our approach is to win the hearts and minds of our associates, which helps us attract and retain the best talent.  In addition, we have a dedicated recruiting effort to look for people with a solid functional background in HR or computer science–and we train and develop them.  OSV has a great on-boarding and ramp program designed to ensure all of our Professional Services teams are highly competent and use a standard operating process.  This helps ensure repeatable and reliable delivery of our customer experience.

Enterprise Software implementation is not an easy business. How do you handle the inevitable challenges that come up during deployment?

Having a project that is scoped well from the beginning, and a proper discovery process can minimize surprises.  OSV has a solid governance model, built from many years of experience.  When challenges do come up, it’s important to identify and raise them early before they escalate.  Our culture at OSV is one of transparency, and we stress the importance of honest communication with our Professional Services team.

Based upon Raven Intel’s aggregate customer review metrics, OSV is tracking higher than the Workday partner ecosystem average in overall satisfaction by 41 NPS (net promoter) points. What’s contributing to this?

It goes back to our people and OSV’s focus on customer satisfaction.  We are one of Workday’s original partners, which has given us the benefit of some of the most years of experience and sheer volume of installs.  We price fairly and deliver on our promises.  Customers appreciate that.

In terms of on-time/on-budget delivery, OSV is also outperforming the Workday aggregate.  What is helping you ensure these delivery rates for your customers?

Because we’ve been doing this for many years, we’ve developed scoping and validation tools which ensure that we’re accurately providing the customer with the project scope up front.  We have a technical group within our sales team who have deep knowledge with Workday deployment who are there to identify and accurately scope the project plan.  This role is acutely focused on determining the customer’s project needs and ensures we’re providing more than a ‘lift-and-shift.’

To read all OSV customer reviews, click the image above.

What advice would you give a customer looking for a Workday partner? What should they be looking for?

First and foremost is a track record of success, and reference-able customers.  That is a key indicator of a good firm.  I think it’s important for a customer to step back and ask, “Why am I doing this project?  Where does this fit into driving transformation in my business?”  The partner that can help you think through both the broader picture, then deliver the technical product implementation effectively is key.

Why would a customer look at OSV, a boutique firm, instead of a Global Systems Integrator (GSI)?

Because we have proven success with customers from emerging businesses all the way through large global enterprises.  We can help recognize and drive transformation and save customers a ton of money.  Particularly through the highly differentiated offerings we have around Workday–Business Process as a Service, Robotics Process Automation, Application Management Services–we can help Workday customers fully optimize their solution, and reduce their costs.

What would you want a customer to know about OSV that they might not know today?

That we have a global reach, and OSV has delivered the more Workday projects in Medium Enterprise in EMEA than any other partner in the ecosystem.  We have have successfully completed Workday deployments in 92 countries.  Particularly with payroll, we have strong integration and partnerships with several multicountry payroll providers (Safeguard Global, Cloud Pay).

What are your goals for the coming year?

To continue the growth of the business globally keeping our focus on quality delivery.  We want to grow our business rationally and maintain our position as one of the best PS firms in the Workday ecosystem.

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OneSource Virtual (OSV) is a customer of Raven Intel for independent service delivery benchmarking and data analysis on customer satisfaction and implementation metrics.  Raven Intel provides Consulting Firms reports and data analysis based on cloud human capital management (HCM) customer reviews as well as aggregate industry benchmarks, covering key performance indicators such as on-time and on-budget delivery of services. 

For more about Raven Intel and our methodology, please click here.