Concept: People Analytics Activities
An activity in People Analytics is a series of job processes that perform a complete task. There are 4 types of activities in People Analytics:
- Data Quality Activity
- Installation Activity
- Update Activity
- Automatic Installation Activity
Data Quality Activity
Workday automatically runs the
Data Quality
module when you install or reinstall People Analytics, but you can also run it manually. The Data Quality
module checks the latest field mapping configuration data to verify that the data satisfies the usefulness, completeness, and correctness requirements of People Analytics and Storyteller.Only 1 Data Quality activity can run at a given time.
Data Quality does not run on the Employee Sentiment pipeline.
Installation Activity
People Analytics uptakes the latest configuration settings saved in the
Configure People Analytics
report and runs them against the series of processes that comprise the installation workflow.At a high level, the installation workflow consists of:
- Acquiring data (In People Analytics Activities, Acquire and Publish Data).
- Securing source data (if configured).
- Publishing the input source data to run through Storyteller (Invoke Storyteller).
- Publishing the output source data in the form of focus insights and summaries. (Publish Dataset)
- Creating a discovery board where you can view KPIs, business questions, and related metrics.
- Exporting input source data to the machine learning development environment to improve the detection algorithms used in the People Analytics product.
If your installation fails before step 4, consider checking the validity of your data using the Data Quality module. See Troubleshooting: Data Quality Module. If your installation fails after step 3, consider raising a customer care ticket.
This activity runs when you click
Run Installation
in the Configure People Analytics
report. Workday runs the automatic installation activity when necessary, which does not change your current configuration settings. For more details on the automatic installation activity, see the Automatic Installation section in this topic. Only 1 installation activity can run at a given time. If you make changes to your current configuration and reinstall the application, these changes to your application run as an installation activity and not an update activity.
The data quality activity runs automatically when you run the installation activity.
Update Activity
People Analytics runs automated updates every Sunday at 3:00 AM in the tenant time zone to ensure that all users are on the latest version of the product. Application updates delivered to tenants as part of the automated update activity might result in changes in People Analytics functionality. However, these updates do not affect your People Analytics configuration and require no additional action from you.
Data Refresh
On the nearest Sunday following the end of the fiscal period (first Sunday of the month, if your fiscal schedule coincides with the calendar year), the automated update activity also checks for and loads any new content that is available since the last data refresh. People Analytics appends the new data to your current data history. This new data is the current snapshot period.
The automated update starts between 02:00 and 03:00 AM of your tenant local timezone and the update only refreshes the data if the start time equals 12:00AM UTC or later of the first Sunday following the end of your configured fiscal period.
The data refresh process doesn't load data retrospectively. If you want to apply retrospective changes, you must reinstall People Analytics.
The People Analytics report is available for access while the automated update activity is running. When the activity finishes as successful, the system refreshes the app and displays any new data.
In the top-right corner of the app, People Analytics displays the Data as of date, which indicates the month of the current snapshot period. Example: Data as of November 30, 2023.
The update activity runs only in the Production tenant. If you want to ensure that your Implementation or Preview tenant is on the latest version, reinstall People Analytics using the
Configure People Analytics
report.Automatic Installation Activity
People Analytics runs the automatic installation activity (shown in the
People Analytics Activities
report as Auto Install) to deliver new content to all tenants. Like the update activity, the automatic installation activity:
- Ensures that all users are on the latest version of the product.
- Does not alter the configuration settings that ran during the last manual installation of People Analytics.
However, the automatic installation activity might require that you change your People Analytics configuration in order to uptake newly delivered content. When a pipeline contains new content for you to uptake, the pipeline configuration card shows the pipeline status
Action Required
. To change your configuration to uptake new content, you must reinstall People Analytics. A reinstallation of People Analytics displays in the
People Analytics Activities
report as an installation activity. Viewing Activities
The
People Analytics Activities
report (secured to the Manage: People Analytics
domain in the People Analytics and Prism Analytics functional areas) displays all new and historical activities for your tenant.By default, the activities table displays the status and details for the activity at the top level. You can also click the activity at the top level to open the information panel. The information panel also shows the status and details for the activity, as well as any important messages.
You can expand an activity to see the status and details of each intermediate step in the activity workflow.
You can customize your view of activities by filtering and sorting them. We recommend applying these customizations when activities are collapsed and showing only details at the top level.
Workday recommends that you regularly view activities to ensure that scheduled updates are successful, and that People Analytics is displaying data for the current snapshot period.
You can create custom reports and discovery boards using People Analytics data sources for ad hoc reporting purposes or to validate your data. Most are automatically updated and don't require any additional action from you. However, reports and discovery boards built on top of data quality data are only valid until the next automated update or until you run Data Quality or installation again. However, you must delete these resources before the next Data Quality, automated update, or installation run to ensure that these activities complete successfully.
Managing Activities
You can right-click an activity at the top level to access the related actions menu. The related actions menu enables you to:
- Cancel the remaining steps for an activity that is in progress. When you cancel an activity, it might take time for remaining steps to terminate and display the statusCanceled.
- Retry any failed steps that exist for an activity with the statusFailed.
Cancel
and Retry
actions are only available for the latest activity of a given activity type.