On the Factor of Project Governance

An often overlooked Factor in a HR Technology implementation is Project Governance.
Everyone loves to talk about IT project governance, there are elaborate models built around it, but it is surprising that many of the IT projects usually fall short of the original expectations. Also amongst the IT projects that may be going on in an organization, the HR IT project is usually given the short shrift. This is not unusual, since HR is considered to be "Easy" and not the hard impacting critical project like say Finance or Accounting etc. This inevitably leads to poor governance of these HR technology projects, with it not really being on the radar of the top management.

All projects definitely start with good intentions, but somewhere down the line something goes wrong. So what constitutes good governance? Some of the ideas which I have distilled

Project Governance begins even before the project starts - One HR Technology implementation project that I was part of had this interesting way of project governance. When we had finished with the Fit-Gap analysis, the total number of customizations came up to 45, the Senior VP of IT requested each of the process owners to come up with a reason why a customization was required. After analyzing it with every owner, the list was pruned to just 5..!..

Here is a good example of senior management intervention to ensure that project budget is kept in line & also reminding everyone that the reason a new product was being implemented was to ensure that new business processes were rolled out & not to keep old ideas running in the new system.

It is imperative that even before the project is started, the top management draw out what they want the HR technology project to achieve. This will be the basis on which they will measure everything that follows downstream. Some of the top issues could be

• Project execution within budget & time
• HR solution not to have x% of customizations (the value of x will be debated internally & arrived at)
• Reduction of cycle time in key processes like Recruitment, Payroll etc

These parameters will then be evaluated during the project and after the project is live.

Strong Project Manager - while it is a no brainer that the project will require a strong project manager from the customer side, many a times we have seen that the project manager usually performs the role of a business analyst as well. This is a sure shot recipe for failure, since project management is a full time job & cannot really be combined with anything else. In case the customer feels that there may not be anyone available for this job within the organization, then they should hire some one to play this role.

Continuous top management support - We have seen Steering Committees being setup, meetings being scheduled but hardly any top management participation. The result - a HR Technology project running out of sync with the original parameters on which the project was conceived. The HR solution might then end up with lot of customizations, poor change management, woeful end user adoption and thus run with huge cost and effort escalation. Thus a strong continuous committment from the top management is essential to see that the project is in shape & progressing well.

Project health checks at various intervals - While the above factors are important, it is useful to also consider having project health checks to ensure the project is in alignment with original goals. The health checks can be conducted at various milestones like Fit Gap, Unit testing, System testing, User Acceptance, Cutover etc - how to do this & what all to consider in the scope of a project health check will be the subject of a future post.

A case of lower expectations

Most of the organizations in India which decide to go for an HR technology implementation actually have fairly low expectations from their implementations. This might sound a little paradoxical in the context of most of the system integrators complaining that Indian clients are very difficult to handle and the large number of implementations hitting the rough weather. Nonetheless, this is true.

The expectation from most of the organizations is primarily to consolidate the workforce data in a centralized system and automate the core operational processes. This gives them a basic insight into the workforce in terms of headcounts, reporting structures etc and help them increase HR department’s productivity by taking away the high load of manual record keeping and processing in functions such as onboarding, transfers, payroll and exit. At best the system is used to decentralize service delivery through self service access for employees and managers to manage essential functions such as leave, time and appraisals. Beyond this , there is no expectation whatsoever from the technology solution to help in objective alignment, workforce profiling, talent and leadership development , measuring effectiveness, managing employee and alumni relationships and attracting the best talent available out there in a competitive job market.

This lowering of expectations could be due to a number of reasons. The first and foremost remains the lack of appreciation within the HR community that a technology based solution can be used to drive the aforementioned strategic initiatives. This lack of appreciation and comfort results in them never demanding these functionalities from the implementers. Moreover, very often organizations are not ready as the organizational processes have not reached the right level of maturity for these initiatives to kick in.

The other important reason is that the implementers or IT consultants themselves are not aware of these practices and advanced system know-how to implement them. The fact remains that most of the HCM IT consultants do not have an academic or professional background in Human Resources and do not have a grounding in these practice areas, The other related issue is that best resources in the Indian IT companies are not deployed on Indian projects as the consultants themselves prefer working in overseas locations and projects.

Indian organizations very often rely on the management consulting firms to define their strategic human resource initiatives and processes. However, this group of strategic HR consultants hardly ever go down to the system level or even discuss the possibility of using the HR technology solutions to drive these processes and initiatives.

As a result, the bar for HR technology initiatives is kept quiet low. This means that organizations take an easy route of automating their current or as-is processes, thereby taking a stringent stance against any work around, reengineering or best practices. This results in the solution to go through massive customization which is generally welcomed by the system integrators as customization is easier to achieve using the rookie resources who are well versed in programming and also provides a higher revenue stream than what is called a vanilla implementation. The higher level of customizations means that application of product fixes and future upgrades become very complex, risky and costly which in turn forces the customers to stick to the old release of the solution and not able to leverage the new advances and enhancement in the solution.

This vicious cycle coupled with the governance issues during the implementation ensure that the solutions fail to achieve the higher level of maturity and value addition for the organizations. Therefore, most important need for the organizations is to raise their expectations from their HR technology implementation and demand more rather than less.

More on this in future posts.

Significance of the name H Factors

We are all aware of the term Factorial (also shortened as Factor) from our school days. All of us used to dread those permutations and combinations topic & this term used to very frequently appear there.
So just to refresh memories.. n! meant the product of all numbers less than or equal to n, so 5! will be 5*4*3*2*1. Hence higher the "n" higher this factor number. Also colloquially, we often say, there are n number of ways of doing this..!.

When we looked around the HR and the HR technology space we found that there are lot of things that the organizations could do which would add value to their HR technology investments. We can call these "things" as Factors. This blog as Tanzil mentions below is focused on all the factors that matter to organizations, but due to many reasons remain under utilized.

Hence we decided to name this blog as H Factors, which signify a number of factors which can & should be taken care of to ensure that an organization fully realizes its value from its HR technology & thus manage its employees better. As we go along we will be highlighting these factors and suggesting ways and means to better them.

Also the Factor symbol when turned upside down resembles a human like figure & thus nicely fits in with our name. The image on the right side represents our thoughts on the name of this blog.

HR Technology in India – Aiming for the sky

HR Technology Solutions have made huge strides in the last couple of years and the strategic HR offerings of the major business software vendors are fairly advanced and cater to the current thought processes in Human Resources. The current focus seems to be on aligning organization objectives to individual goals, talent management, effective service delivery and developing workforce insight.

Indian organizations have seen tremendous growth and workforce transformation over the last two decades. The nature of organizational roles, demographic distribution, compensation structures and the organizational culture have all been through massive changes. To manage the burgeoning workforce, a large number of firms in India have invested in technology solutions. However, most of these systems are characterized by adhoc and incremental application development and roll-out based on situational functional requirements rather than a well thought out HCM strategy. This results in incremental operational efficiency and does not give any real competitive advantage. The current implementations in these organizations are also not able to support the complexity in organization structures and people and talent management practices in the organizations.

The current implementations also fail to fully leverage the capabilities of the packaged solutions. The transactional HR modules are implemented and used to a large extent but the utilization of Strategic HR modules is fairly low. In many cases modules are bought but never deployed. User adoption seems to be a major issue with users not being able to use the system beyond the basic transactions.

The focus of this blog is to discuss the capabilities, challenges and future directions of HR technology and how can it be leveraged for strategic processes such as objective alignment, pay for performance, leadership and talent planning especially from the perspective of Indian organizations. We will bring the academic, practice, solutions and implementation contexts together in our discussions for a better appreciation of the HR technology and its application as a tool for building competitive advantage through people.