Workday Rising 25 - how Wells Fargo gave developers their evenings back

Configuration changes shouldn't cost developers their evenings with family, but often, they do. At Workday Rising 25, Wells Fargo's Kevin Wallenberg explained how automating deployment tooling helped him stop missing dinner with his eight-year-old daughter. 

The session Mastering Configuration Change Management brought together Wallenberg, Lead Software Engineer at Wells Fargo, and Cormac Carty, Senior Product Manager at Workday, around one of the perennial headaches of enterprise IT – how to make configuration change management less risky, less time-consuming, and less reliant on manual effort.

Wells Fargo's high-volume test bed

Wells Fargo is no small testing center. The company migrated from PeopleSoft to Workday in January 2022, bringing around 240,000 workers into the system. This scale makes Wells Fargo a major test bed for Workday's deployment tooling. Wallenberg described the scale of activity involved in simply keeping the system aligned with business needs:

For reference, last year we had about 11,500 object transporter migrations to production. The year prior, we had about 13,154. I ran some numbers yesterday, and we had 768 production migrations this year, and about 7,900 migrations between tenants.

The decline in raw numbers is intentional. Wells Fargo is "getting smarter" about packaging, grouping dependencies together rather than moving single items in isolation. That change in practice reflects the reality of working across 20 different product teams, each generating 50 to 150 user stories every sprint.

The footprint is equally vast: 3,100 custom reports, 800 integrations, 33,000 calculated fields, six Extend applications, and hundreds of Prism datasets. These are the kind of numbers that make configuration management both essential and exhausting. Each of these elements represents a potential configuration change. For a risk-averse organization in financial services, Wallenberg said, the stakes are high:

In our industry, there's a high need for control. We need to make sure that everything is done to meet auditors' needs and basically to minimize the risk.

The case against manual change

Manual configuration, Wallenberg argued, remains one of the biggest sources of error:

It's so easy to transpose a number or miss a step or not carry something forward

Worse, a refresh can wipe out work altogether. Wells Fargo refreshes its development tenant on a six-week cycle, and without careful packaging, that can mean days of work lost.

He recalled a recent case where a payroll product owner returned from vacation to find his work gone after a refresh:

Had he leveraged this change tracker, he could have identified those and then exported it and reapplied it later, but he lost about two days of work. So it happens.

This kind of fragility led Wells Fargo to invest heavily in using OT to minimize "hands on keyboard" tasks. For Wallenberg, the argument is also personal:

If I'm at work I'm not at home, spending time with my daughter. I deployed code to prod at five o'clock every Thursday, and it's like, okay, I miss dinners, I miss bedtimes, I miss things like that. And now we've gotten this process much more streamlined.

Lessons from the heaviest OT user

Carty acknowledged Wells Fargo as "the heaviest customer user of Object Transporter in the ecosystem." Yet even at Wells Fargo, adoption was uneven. Some teams clung to manual edits, a perfectly rational response in an industry where 'it worked fine until we changed it' is practically a governing principle. Training and championing the tool internally became essential.

There may be someone that's junior to the team that doesn't know some of the benefits of object transporter. I recently had someone that was unaware that an object type could be migrated. So she actually keyed like 15 data points in multiple environments because she didn't know she could migrate it.

To counter this, Wallenberg built metrics on "missed opportunities" where teams could have used OT but didn't, then worked directly with developers to build confidence.

Wallenberg's experience at one of the largest Workday customers and Carty's product roadmap painted a picture of an ecosystem where risk, time, and human error are constant concerns, and where automation is steadily becoming the lever to ease the burden.

Carty used the Wells Fargo experience as a way to show how Workday is evolving its tooling. The updates center on automation and intelligence. The Configuration Change Tracker provides an automated way to see what's been altered in a tenant over a given period, while Configuration Extracts allow admins to pull configuration into secure, encrypted files for reuse after refreshes. Tenant Compare eliminates the need for side-by-side browser windows by automating comparisons between tenants, and the improved Object Transporter now offers clearer error messages, AI-generated resolution suggestions for opted-in customers, and the ability to merge rather than overwrite security settings. Pre-migration difference reports complete the suite by highlighting what's about to change before it happens. 

The workflow was illustrated with a demo scenario that will feel familiar to any enterprise IT professional – a Workday admin facing a looming Friday refresh could use Change Tracker to identify all their changes, package them, extract them securely, and then reload them on Monday morning with minimal disruption – and crucially, without the usual weekend anxiety about what might be broken come Monday.

In the future, Workday plans to nearly double the number of configuration types that can be migrated via OT, from around 450 to close to 900 – a reminder that enterprise software's appetite for configuration options is apparently limitless. 

Security group migration is a long-standing request and is marked as a "coming soon" capability. Workday is also testing a Deployment Assistant, built on a Large Language Model (LLM), that draws on documentation and community knowledge to help admins troubleshoot migration challenges. According to Carty, early adopters among implementers "absolutely love the answers they get, to the point that most of them now say, I wouldn't be able to do my job on a daily basis without this."

My take

The Wells Fargo case is significant not only for its size but for how visibly it exposes the pain points of configuration change management. Large enterprises are constantly caught between the need for control, the volume of changes demanded by the business, and the limited resources available to carry them out.

What stands out in this session is how much of the innovation is about saving time – time for developers, time for deployment teams, and even, as Wallenberg made clear, time for family. By reframing efficiency as both a business and a human concern, the conversation underlined why tooling matters.

The roadmap also signals a shift. Workday is not just expanding object coverage but embedding AI into the troubleshooting process, nudging configuration management toward a more guided, assistant-driven model. This direction should help companies with limited resources and high risk tolerance, though implementation will determine the actual value.

The lesson is less about any one technical feature than about developing confidence. Automation only delivers value if teams trust it. Wells Fargo's story shows that adoption requires champions, training, and persistence. The tools are available, but the cultural shift is the harder migration.