When you are in the middle of the exciting journey of implementing a new HRIS system, you may forget, or take too little time, to think about the day-to-day practice after the project. What about your BAU (Business As Usual) activities after go-live? How should we set it up? When do we start? Who will be part of this BAU organisation? Here are our 4 steps to support your HRIS system after go-live.
Step 1: Questionnaire on configuration and company profile
The first thing to do, is to sit down together and fill out a questionnaire covering important questions like:
- Which modules are in scope?
- How are the business processes designed?
- How high do we estimate our data quality to be?
- How many integrations do we have to support?
- What is the size of our company?
- What does our population look like?
- In how many, and which countries are we operating?
Step 2: Exploring different ways to setup your BAU organisation
Based on the outcome of the questionnaire, you can make a first estimation of required profiles and the required #FTE. Depending on your HRIS strategy, the available profiles, and potential candidates within the company, you can decide to:
- fully insource -> mostly done within larger organizations with a wide range of modules and operation in multiple countries. Possible when you have all the knowledge in-house, you are keen to keep your knowledge up-to-date and/or willing to invest in attracting missing profiles to build up the knowledge internally
- a hybrid model -> mostly done within midsize organizations with an average or a wide range of modules. Possible when you have most of the core process knowledge in-house but need some (temporary) support for either easy to support tasks (like release management) or more complex topics (like configuration, security and integration management).
- fully outsource -> mostly done within smaller organizations with an average or a wide range of modules, which do not have the knowledge in-house, are not having the intention to build it up and/or operating in geographical areas where it is hard to attract (and keep!) the right profiles
Please be aware that above mentioned categories are purely based on our personal experiences and can divers from company to company.
Step 3: Prepare and plan next steps
Depending on your decision made in step 2, you need to prepare yourself and plan the required next steps. Think about activities like:
- Creating clear role descriptions
- Starting an interview process to fill in the required roles
- Defining knowledge gaps to start additional training requirements in an early stage
- Starting up an AMS provider selection process when external support is considered -> Please be aware that there are also AMS providers who are offering a cost efficient Fastlane Program, which provides you with a junior consultant (at junior rate), which will be trained during x months and can be taken over after that period of time
- Designing the support process (including follow-the-sun when required)
- Designing the ticketing process
- Looking for existing internal ticketing tool to use for HR as well, or select a new ticketing tool
Step 4: Ensure proper handover from the project to BAU
In order to prepare your BAU team the best way you can, it is very important to ensure that all documents and knowledge are properly handed over from the project to BAU. When this is not done (completely) or does not meet the requirements of the BAU team, it must be flagged in an early stage. This last part can be challenging, as the BAU team is usually created at the end of the project.
To make your support organisation successful, the following topics should be in place prior to (or closely following) go-live:
- Governance Model
- Role Descriptions / RACI Matrix
- Training (both key users and BAU support team members)
- Availability of User Documentation and FAQs
- Ticketing System
- Change Process (both CRs and release changes)
- Test Strategy
- Authorisation Matrix
- Data Model
- Reporting Catalogue
- HR Service Calendar (does not need to be ready from day one, but will become important rather soon after go-live)
Pitfalls
During various implementations, we identified a number of pitfalls of how to support your HRIS system after go-live, which can be easily prevented when you know them beforehand:
- Make sure that you start thinking about the setup of your BAU organisation early enough (3-6 months before go-live). Most companies put all resources towards the project itself and then need to rush at the end. Be aware that your user experience and acceptance decrease significantly when your end-users cannot find their way in the new HRIS system and feel that they are not being supported quickly and adequately enough.
- During an AMS provider selection, be very clear about the kind of support you need and make sure the provider clearly states what they will deliver. We have seen too many setups or contracts that make it almost impossible to build long-term relationships because the provider is always operating “on the edge”. You should be able to just count on them to fix things, without ending up with endless discussions and/or additional billing.
- Depending on the population of your company (white / blue collar), ensure that you serve them in a way that they understand and makes them feel understood. E.g. adapt your communication to the different levels of employees and ensure that your production workers can and know how to use the system as well through for example kiosks
- Don’t start the handover from the project to BAU as a last exercise. E.g. already include the BAU team in E2E testing and hypercare, so that they can learn in an early stage and better judge the quality of the documents that are being handed over.
- Ensure that your data quality is on a high level before go-live. If your data quality is poor, this will likely lead to integration issues immediately. Analysing these tickets takes a lot of time for your BAU organisation and can mostly be put down to data-quality issues instead of technical limitations / errors in the integration.
If you want to know more in detail on the various steps and/or need help to set up your BAU organisation, please reach out to to our team or
