Author: Prof. (Dr.) KIRAN KAKADE

What are the secrets to HRMS implementation success?

To start make a comprehensive plan. As with any ambitious project, it’s worth putting the hours in at the beginning to make sure things go right down the line. If you’re feeling a little lost and don’t know where to start putting together your HRMS implementation plan then you’re in luck! Find your way with our 8-step checklist.

1.Change Management

When implementing an HRMS, the impact of change on the people working in the organization should be taken into consideration. In the broad, people respond to change in broadly predictable ways. For your HRMS implementation to be successful, you need to build your communication strategy based on a structured model, such as the Lewis-Parker diagram below:

2.Hiring an HRMS consultant

First assess the need for a consultant. You might consider hiring an external consultant for the following reasons:

• If your employee surveys indicate that HR is performing poorly, or is considered slow and unresponsive.
• If you’re anticipating a major change to your current HR systems and processes.
• If there are strong differences in opinion between major stakeholders.

Once you’ve decided you need an expert to select and/or implement your new HR technology, look for a credible HRMS consultant who you feel has the necessary skills and a good understanding of the HRMS market. Additional things to note include their ability to form relationships with senior executives and their potential cultural fit within your organization.

References are important at this stage because the size and structure of their previous HR projects are likely to inform their next endeavor. If this information isn’t clear, here are some questions you can ask a candidate’s referees to gain a greater understanding of their past experience:

• What was the scope of their HRMS project?
• What exactly did the consultant contribute?
• Was the expected ROI achieved?
• What problems cropped up and how were they tackled?

3.Data Migration

When migrating data from your legacy HRMS to your new system, you first need to plan your approach. Firstly review your current data, identify gaps and check its accuracy. As part of the stakeholder engagement exercise, ask everyone to check their own personal information. Security should you be at the forefront on your mind, especially if your new HRMS is taking you into the cloud. Your IT manager can help oversee this process.

4.System Testing

Testing is an essential step when implementing a new HRMS. Look at employee lifecycle as a starting point for test scripts. Often processes will fail and require another round of testing. Only retest the broken aspect until it passes then run it through your end to end test processes to be sure everything is working as it should.

In addition to your main implementation plan, outline a schedule for testing, configuration and system setup. More aspects to take into account are integration with other business intelligence systems, procedures and parallel running with the system you were using before (particularly applicable to payroll). Your new system should be faster and more accurate than the last.

Expect to perform two types of tests: functional and those that require representative user groups to test the system to the limits of its capacity. Assuming you’re implementing a new HRMS of greater capabilities, some functions will have no prior benchmark for comparison. In this case, take a step back and evaluate whether wider business goals are being met.

5.User Training

Poor user adoption can result in the failure of an HRMS implementation project. Tying your user-training plan to wider business goals, such as reduced costs, improved employee satisfaction, enhanced reputation and better legislative compliance, will keep you on course.

Who should be involved in HRMS user-training?

USER GROUP	ROLE
Executive or C-level users	HR analytics and strategic level reporting.
Line managers .	Employee recordkeeping, workforce scheduling and leave management, recruitment and onboarding and performance management tracking.
Individual employees	Access to their own personal records, booking time off, making benefits choices etc.
HR Staff	Advisory, analytical.

The table above outlines the minimal number of users you will usually need to train. Identify the capabilities of each group by identifying their current depth of knowledge or any skills gaps. Design appropriate levels of learning inventions required to bring users up to speed before go-live.

6.Budget

An HRMS budget can easily overrun. Several errors at the planning phase can cause problems here. A robust HRMS implementation plan will involve both HR and IT staff. But these relationships need to be managed. Functional specifications should be signed off before developers are allocated to start otherwise there could be complications.

Many companies forget to anticipate updates and maintenance costs. If you’ve opted for a cloud system, the pricing model will most likely be pay-as-you-go and the cost will depend on the number of users or employee records. With an on-premise system you’ll need to check if have to take out an additional maintenance contract. You should also factor in the cost of continued user training as it’s critical when it comes to ROI.

7.Go-Live

When it’s time for go-live, users’ first experience should be at the forefront of your mind. You should put together a detailed risk assessment of everything that could possibly go wrong with a contingency plan that outlines what to do if problems arise. An important part of preparing for go-live is establishing what support will be available to users for example:

Super-users: particularly proficient users with an in-depth understanding of the project can be on hand for colleague queries.
Technical support: for when a hardware or software problem does occur and needs to be solved straight-away.
Automatic reminders: that let anyone who logs onto the corporate system know that the new HRMS is about to go live.
JiT: or ‘just-in-time’ training refers to learning resources that are on demand for well-supported users to quickly look up a piece of information they may have forgotten or missed.

Remember to make arrangements for bug and glitch reporting.

8.Challenges

Most hrms implementation projects will face challenges. Here is a checklist of basic questions to ask post go-live:

• Are the features functioning as expected?
• What errors are occurring and are they within the expected margins?
• Were the bugs and glitches fixed within the desired timeframes? (And, are the fixes being applied with the longer term in mind?)
• How did data integrity stack up against expectations?
• Is the system working with other integrated databases and systems as expected?
• What ‘quick wins’ are emerging? And can you announce them so that you have some early positive news to give out?

Stakeholders who were involved in the earlier stages of implementation can give feedback in terms of whether their needs are being met. This will also help you identify fresh training gaps that should be addressed.

It’s rare that HRMS implementation runs completely smoothly. There’s will often be things we wish we did differently. Learn by acknowledging these mistakes and doing your best to rectify them as quickly and thoughtfully.

A final thought…

By following these steps you’ll give your HRMS implementation a good foundation from which you can build success. Inevitably there will be some pitfalls on the way but by preparing yourself and putting contingencies in place, you can handle any unforeseen variables that would otherwise significantly disrupt the project.

Selecting and buying the right HRMS can be a convoluted and complicated process. However, when it comes to transforming your organization’s approach to human resources management, how you implement the new system determines how enthusiastically (or not) your employees will embrace their new automated HR services. In the words of The Carpenters, we’ve only just begun…

The following are three of the key HR software implementation best practices:

HR software implementation best practice #1 – Having an implementation team

No one person can implement your HRMS (even if they could handle the workload, they need input from key stakeholders from the rest of the organization) and so, choosing your implementation team is a key success factor.

Pick the right people. Preferably those with the experience and know-how to navigate a detailed, multi-faceted implementation project, including scheduling communications, user engagement activities, training programs, system testing, data migration and the go-live day.

Also consider engaging external assistance, either direct from the system vendor or from an HRMS consultant. Such help may be driven by a lack of in-house knowledge or skill or simply a lack of time and resources. And before the team begins the task at hand, think about their onboarding… Yes, they may all know the organization, they may even all know each other, but you need a high-performing team, and fast. So, make sure you provide some clarity on project goals, success criteria, plans, and strategy. Agree on individual roles and objectives then give the team the information and resources they need for success.

HR software implementation best practice #2 – The implementation plan

Remember the Scout motto: be prepared. As with any project, you need a clear plan that lays out the route from the purchase of your HRMS right through to it being a widely-adopted element of your organization’s systems and structure.

Use our step-by-step HRMS implementation plan to make your HR software implementation a success

For an HRMS, this means talking to stakeholders and planning to satisfy their needs:

• The C-suite are expecting a clear return on their investment in the shape of strategic HR functionality.
• The HR team is looking for a system that streamlines their function, freeing up time for higher level, more ‘human-necessary’ tasks, and projects.
• Users tend to just want something that makes their working lives easier with the minimum of effort (e.g. the need to learn new systems) on their part.

Involve each of these three main stakeholder groups in your planning, and in the ongoing monitoring and governance of that plan.

HR software implementation best practice #3 – Change management

Systems and technology are usually predictable, people are not. That said, they do respond to change (any change) in a broadly similar fashion, usually a variation on the denial-resistance-exploration-acceptance process.

To handle this ‘people element’ of HRMS implementation, you need a change management plan that defines a route to take employees from an initial lack of knowledge about the system to being accomplished users, automatically using the HRMS for their HR-related inquiries and transactions.

It’s no real surprise that all three of the above elements relate to planning in some way. After all, most organizations are in agreement with the principle of good planning (a PwC report noted that a whopping 97% of respondents believes project management is critical to business performance and organizational success). However, around the same time, the Standish Group finding was that less than a third of all projects finish on time and on budget. The need for planning may be commonly accepted but it’s far from commonly acted on.

Despite decades of implementing ERP systems, projects continue to disappoint or to go off the rails entirely. For every resounding success, there appears to be a stunning failure. The reasons for these failures are many and varied but one that shows up regularly in results analysis is poor or non-existent change management. Traditionally the reason for this has been that the amount of change involved when a company moves to a new system has been under-estimated. It can often appear that, after go-live, buyers will be continuing to raise purchase orders, sales office staff will be continuing to enter sales orders and accounts staff will be continuing to process invoices; so nothing is really changing and all that is required is some training so that users can get used to new screens.

But companies should not confuse the scale of change with the impact of change: the two are frequently disproportionate to one another. A new system isn’t just about new screens: underneath the surface, much will be different. Inevitably, new things will have to be done, old things will have to be done in new ways, and jobs may even cross departmental boundaries (e.g. in the old system, sales invoices may have been raised by accounts but, in the new, it might have to be a sales office task or it might even be an automatic routine following the warehouse despatch transaction).Some companies, such as start-ups, positively thrive on change – it is in their DNA. Others, particularly in highly-regulated industries, instinctively resist it. In the pharmaceutical industry, for example, changing the formulation of a medicine is a very big deal indeed, and companies in aerospace can find that simply changing the machine that a component is processed on can mean that a complete recertification is required: a time-consuming and costly exercise. So many will need help with change and many of these, lacking sufficient in-house skills, will bring in external consultant change managers; but even these can have problems.

Change is often resisted not only at a corporate level, but at an individual employee level also. Some employees, although recognizing the weaknesses and inadequacies of the existing system, will genuinely believe “better the devil you know”. The more-experienced ones will know how to get around many of the problems in the old system and may well enjoy the kudos that gives them in the eyes of junior staff (and, indeed, of management). Some people also resist change because they lack confidence in their ability to be able to cope with something new, particularly if they are not used to that.In both instances, the problem is that, when someone is brought in from outside to manage change, change can be seen as being their responsibility, and not that of regular managers and employees, so when they leave, the support they have been giving leaves with them. The answer is that companies should bring in change managers not to work on specific projects but to teach them how to manage change themselves. Change management needs to move from being a tick-box on a project plan to being a mindset, a set of tools that are in continual use, and a methodology that everyone in the company can adopt with confidence.

Change is inevitable, even eventually for the companies that resist it, and it is best to confront it and not just to react to it. When that happens; ERP failure will start to be a thing of the past.

June, the start of the new academic year and time for reflection.  What worked last year? What didn’t? What can I do to improve learning in my classroom? What can my students do to become better learners?  What innovations in education might benefit my students? What’s working for other teachers and students?  These are some of the questions I’ve been asking myself over the last couple of weeks as I’ve been getting my teaching head back on (not that we ever really get it off, par for the course being a teacher!)

Back in Jan after reflecting upon the sem and doing some self/student evaluations, I decided that the protagonists of my classroom this year (apart from my students of course) will be flipped learning and cooperative learning. Flipping in earnest will be new for my students this year, however cooperative learning is something we introduced last semester. Students are finally getting used to this way of working and starting to understand (and reap) some of the benefits…

So, I’ve been thinking about how to incorporate some of these strategies to make the best use of the extra class time I’ll have when I start flipping learning with one of my classes (Part-Time MHRDM batch)in the last semester.  

One of my favourite cooperative learning activities is the Think- Pair- Share in which students work together to solve a problem or answer a question about an assigned reading. This strategy requires students to (1) think individually about a topic or answer to a question; and (2) share ideas with classmates. Discussing with a partner maximizes participation, focuses attention and engages students in comprehending the reading material.

T : (Think) Faculty begin by asking a specific question about the text. Students “think” about what they know or have learned about the topic.

P : (Pair) Each student should be paired with another student or a small group.

S : (Share) Students share their thinking with their partner. Faculty expand the “share” and conclude with the solution

This is an excellent quick ,fun simple activity that shows the value of team work, it will get everybody energized and moving around the room and excited about the training , It can be a great opener for your team building class.

This is an excellent activity that shows the value of team work, it will get everybody energized and moving around the space and excited about the training , It can be a great opener for your team building class.

Brainstorming is a method for generating ideas to solve a design problem. It usually involves a group, under the direction of a facilitator. The strength of brainstorming is the potential participants have in drawing associations between their ideas in a free-thinking environment, thereby broadening the solution space.

Eight House Rule of Brainstorming

1. Set a time limit – depending on the problem’s complexity, 15–60 minutes is normal.
2. Begin with a target problem/brief – members should approach this sharply defined question, plan or goal and stay on topic.
3. Refrain from judgment/criticism – no-one should be negative (including via body language) about any idea.
4. Encourage weird and wacky ideas – further to the ban on killer phrases like “too expensive”, keep the floodgates open so everyone feels free to blurt out ideas, as long as they’re on topic.
5. Aim for quantity – remember, “quantity breeds quality”; the sifting-and-sorting process comes later.
6. Build on others’ ideas – it’s a process of association where members expand on others’ notions and reach new insights, allowing these ideas to trigger their own. Say “and”—rather than discourage with “but”—to get ideas closer to the problem.
7. Stay visual – diagrams and Post-Its help bring ideas to life and help others see things in different ways.
8. Allow one conversation at a time – keeping on track this way and showing respect for everyone’s ideas is essential for arriving at concrete results.