Okta Workday Provisioning Fails With Conflicting Actions Error

Okta generates a provisioning error for Workday when a user profile contains future-dated actions. Temporarily removing the future-dated actions in Workday allows the profile update to push successfully. The following error appears in the Okta dashboard during the provisioning flow:

Automatic profile push of user to app Workday failed: Unable to update personal info for Workday employee: Validation error occurred. You cannot initiate this action because there are other pending or completed actions for the worker that conflict with this one.

• Okta Identity Engine (OIE)
• Okta Classic Engine
• Workday Provisioning
• Attribute Mappings

The issue occurs when the user profile in Workday contains future-dated actions, typically during the pre-start interval, as described in the Workday Provisioning documentation. Workday generates the error because the attribute mapped from Okta is pending. Workday prevents attribute updates until after the future-dated action occurs.

NOTE: Setting a non-zero Pre-Start Interval imports future-dated Workday user updates in advance by the specified number of days. For example, a Workday provisioning group membership change scheduled with an effective date two days in the future reflects in Okta immediately on the next import if the Pre-Start Interval value is set to three.

How is the Workday conflicting actions error resolved?

Remove the future-dated actions in the Workday user profile, push the profile update from Okta, and restore the future-dated actions in Workday.

1. Temporarily remove any future-dated actions in the user profile in Workday.
2. Re-attempt the profile update push from Okta.
3. Re-add the future-dated actions in Workday after the profile update completes.