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
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.
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