Illustration: Studio van Laar
This article appeared in CHRO Magazine (in Dutch)
Within SuccessDay there is a lot of experience with regard to the pitfalls in HRIT or HCM implementations. All Senior Consultants have worked on the client-side and have experienced firsthand what mistakes are easily made and what is often underestimated. This experience makes SuccessDay an indispensable advisor for organizations before, during and after HCM or HRIT implementations. In this article 7 experienced experts share the 7 most important pitfalls: Bas, Ruben, Eveline, Philippe, Stijn and Steven.
Implementing a new system is not the holy grail. It won’t suddenly solve all your problems. It’s a step in the right direction, though, and it will evolve over time.
Organizations are evolving rapidly, are innovating and are looking ahead. This is essential in a rapidly changing world and in a tight labor market that is reaching historic proportions. In the Netherlands there are more vacancies than unemployed people, and the war for talent is in full swing. So now is the time to streamline your HR processes and gear them towards the demands of management and employees. A smart, user-friendly HRIT system is indispensable for this. But the transition to a new HRIT system is an intensive process that often poses major challenges. How do you go about it and where do you start? Make an analysis of the HR organization, carefully select a software package, prepare well for the implementation, test the tools extensively, manage your data and set up a support organization during and after the go-live.
Independent advice and practical support before, during and after the transition to a new system – whether it’s from SAP, Oracle, Workday or Talentsoft – is not an unnecessary luxury. 7 experienced experts from SuccessDay list the 7 most important pitfalls of an HRIT implementation for you, so you can use this to your advantage.
Pitfall 1: Unstructured vendor selection
How do you select a vendor and how do you know you’ve made the right choice? Vendor selection is still too often unstructured, knows Managing Consultant Ruben Stavast, SuccessDay’s selection specialist. “With an HRIT or HCM system you want to be able to move forward for a good number of years. That’s why it’s important to ask the right questions during the selection procedure. What is the purpose of the system to be chosen? How does it impact business? What requirements are there, and which ones are most important? Only when there is a clear answer to the questions can suitable suppliers be approached.”
Set up a steering committee for the selection with enthusiastic and experienced employees, coming from different parts of the organization. Not just people from HR and IT, but also people from Finance and last but not least people from business. It is the latter that will actually be using the implemented software, especially for self-service products and services.
It is important to realize that software is a means and not an end in itself. Perhaps you want to improve the employee experience or improve the quality of your HR data. After you’ve determined the “Why?”, you approach suppliers not only for a demo, but also for working out a use case. This will really clarify how the HRIT system can work specifically for your organization.
Ask the right questions. Often customers inquire internally: what do we need? But then you get a huge list of requirements. “All the vendors you approach with questions like: ‘Can you do a hiring process?’ or ‘Can the system also be in Slovak?’ answer: ‘We can do that, no problem. But nobody really goes into it in depth. And later, during the implementation, it turns out that you should have asked more questions about specific points. We once got the answer: the system supports all languages. Later it turned out that Slovak was the most difficult language in the world. That language was not well supported in all the tools at the right level, including mobile. Also, it turned out that we were responsible for the management ourselves. In itself, that doesn’t have to be a problem, but finding out afterwards is not pleasant. We always create customer-specific use cases. For example, we recently helped a customer who was taking over many companies. In that case, it is important that they can quickly integrate new companies into the HRIT system.”
Also perform technical deep dives, for example in the areas of data, integrations, connectivity, access management and security. And – last but not least – map out the costs. The business case consists not only of a license fee and implementation costs, but also of support costs. So don’t forget to calculate the number of people you need to support the system after a go-live (internal and external).
Pitfall 2: Lack of Design Principles
“Once you have determined the ‘Why?’ it is important not to begin vendor selection before you have determined the design principles. And yet, all too often this is the case. And that’s a shame,” emphasizes Steven Thangathurai, responsible as AMS manager within SuccessDay.
“When developing and setting up your HR system, all kinds of stakeholders are involved. Customers, colleagues and team members each work together from their own discipline, function and role. But how do you ensure that everyone stays on the same page? And how do you prevent decisions getting bogged down in endless discussions about personal preferences and tastes? With the help of design principles, the starting points for a newly to be developed product are established.”
Design principles define the context of your design. They provide a clear framework for defining the most important wishes and needs of users, the organisation and technology. This makes the desired user experience clear to everyone. So make sure you have a good set of clear assessment criteria to test all choices and decisions during the project. One example of this could be: a maximum of two approval levels, so decisions are not delayed endlessly because not everybody has had a chance to review them.
Without design principles that are formalized by your steering committee, you’re guaranteed to end up on a sliding scale. “A few years ago I supervised a vendor selection where the steering committee wanted a great deal of freedom. They refused to formalize and propagate their own design principles. The final choice of vendor was postponed several times and was ultimately based on strong personal preference. Two years later we did it all over again and they recognized where the issue lied.”
Pitfall 3: Building a house on quicksand
Implementing an HRIT system is always a pressure cooker. There is little time during the process itself to figure things out. So do this in advance. Well begun is half done, says Eveline van Bergen (Senior Functional Consultant) from her own experience. “I once made the mistake of getting started without a good job catalog. Despite the fact that the implementation partner gave a different impression, it turned out to be expensive and difficult to implement afterwards. In fact, career planning, performance management, succession planning and recruitment are not possible without a good job catalog. Another example is that you need to think carefully about your data standards in advance. For example, define what an employee is, what types of employees you have, what 1 FTE is, et cetera. Doing this only during implementation will only result in stress and misery, I can tell you.” So make sure all the processes and essential elements are in place before you start implementing.
Final piece of advice, map your employee journeys with moments that matter and then map that to end-to-end processes before you start implementing. That way you can also see the things that fall outside a system and you won’t start automating like crazy for the sake of automating. “For example, it’s fine to send everyone who applies an automated email with: ‘Thanks for your application, we’ll call if we’re interested!’ This saves the recruiter an enormous amount of time, but is that the kind of feeling you want to give to applicants in a tight labor market?”
Pitfall 4: Starting the project without understanding what’s coming
Think before you act. Director Bas Eggelaar himself used to underestimate on several occasions how many people you would need for such a project. “I knew I had to have a good project manager and I wanted to do the change and user management myself. I now know that this is really not something you can just add on to.”
In addition, it is important to appoint someone on your side as Data Lead and for every module you will need a Functional Lead who acts as the bridge towards your implementation partner and the organization. Finally, you also need to make someone responsible for testing. Realize that this last part cannot be done by just anyone with only a little affinity for IT. Test management of HCM software is a profession on its own. “In short: make a tight schedule, free up people for the process, determine in detail who does what and attract the right people (internally or externally). People often underestimate how much time an implementation takes.
Pitfall 5: Overemphasis on training prior to go-live
Stijn Rombouts is a Senior Functional and Technical Consultant and has found that the right level of adoption is the key to success. “In the first few years, we were often very focused on intensive training for HR and the business before Go-Live. But by the time you start using the system, that knowledge has often largely faded away. I realized that the training itself is not that important, but the acceptance of the ‘Why’ is. It’s mainly about employees and managers knowing how to log in and knowing who to turn to if you run into problems, or knowing where to find the information you need online.”
Pitfall 6: Underestimating the extent of change
When it comes to changes in working methods or the structure of organizations, always take a lot of time. This is invariably underestimated. Both for the HR organization and the employees themselves, who are able to do much more themselves in a modern HCM system. Therefore, appoint ambassadors who will lead the way. Communicate clearly about what everyone can expect and, above all, why you are doing it. Grow understanding. Senior Project Manager Philippe Piso advises to always take a step-by-step approach. “Going live with all modules worldwide in one go does not work. Technically it is always possible, but the cultural differences and the changes are so big that a phased rollout is often better. You have to think carefully about your go-live strategy and take a number of factors into account to arrive at the right scope. A big bang is not necessarily the best option for an organization that is moderately standardized and has a low degree of central control. Opt for an Agile approach. We often recommend rolling out the first part of the employee journey (Recruitment, Core, Onboarding) by sub-area. Once that is in place, you can, for example, deploy a performance module live in one go globally.
Pitfall 7: Go-live without properly functioning support
And then the new system is live! What feels like a party for the project team is not always experienced that way by the user. It takes getting used to, exploring, trial and error. Before long, the internal support organization is overloaded with questions, issues and tickets. At least… if was set up already. Because often this is only thought of at too late a stage. Bas once had to roll out an HRIT system for his previous employer in China. “It sky-rocketed, but when we went live, the support had not been properly arranged. Nobody knew where to ask questions. That led to considerable misunderstanding among managers. They didn’t like the system.”
AMS manager Steven Thangathurai always recommends taking the time to properly set up support during and after going live. “Agree how you will arrange support and who is responsible for technical and non-technical questions. If necessary, bring in support.” For example, SuccessDay supports clients during and after the go-live to ensure a smooth landing and user acceptance. It ensures that the support team at the customer is equipped with the right knowledge and information. Furthermore, it supports after the go-live with release management, resolving technical issues and incidents, regression testing, configuring business processes, environment optimization and integrations with other tools and systems. “Implementing a new system is not the holy grail. It won’t suddenly solve all your problems. It’s a step in the right direction, though, and it will evolve over time.”
