On the factor of HR Consultants

Another important factor which we have observed is the reluctance of Indian organizations to engage HR consultants during the implementations. By usage of the term Consultants, we mean real consulting experience of HR processes, Best Practices, Change Management - & not IT consultants who just do the system implementation.
An interesting study conducted by Accenture pointed out that " Indian firms were unaware of many modern management practices or did not have the know how to implement them".
Also the study showed that companies that availed these consulting practices showed a dramatic improvement in efficiency and profits.
While this study was primarily in the textile manufacturing sector, there is sufficient understanding that a broad based nature of these problems could exist in other industries as well.
In a similar vien, we have seen most of the organizations struggle with their HR technology implementations. Even after implementation, most organizations only use it as a tactical and operational tool failing to fully leverage strategic benefits of the technology.

Why is it that organizations do not want to employ consultants? I premise a few

• Consultants are generally too expensive
• Openness to consulting kind of a model - we know it the best attitude
• Consultants generally recommend too much without actually having a grounding in the problems, what I would call Recommend and Run.

While some of these criticisms are true for the consulting industry, one cannot really use the same brush to tar all consultants. Consultants can bring in their professional grounding in different industries, different verticals and advise clients. Also it is a myth that many consultants are expensive. Organizations can discuss & debate various pricing models with consultants to derive the maximum value from their advice.
It may make sense for organizations to involve consultants in a limited way in niche areas during the course of their HR implementations. The reasons for involving HR consultants could be the following:

• Lack of awareness of HR technology & its application to their HR issues - Organizations are generally good at formulating HR policies but do not know how to implement the same using HR technology.  
• Even before the launch of RFP for the technology to be implemented, there is a lot of due diligence to be done, organizations are generally unaware of how to go about doing the same  
• Organizations are not aware of how to formulate requirements for implementing a technology solution for their HR challenges 
• Lack of clarity on Best Practices: Even though implementation partners claim to bring best practices in the implementation, more often these are a rehash of their last implementation without any thought to the critical parameters such as industry sector, nature and size of the organization, geographical span etc. This generally results in implementation of processes which do not have a fit with organization’s requirements. This has to be done at the time of requirement definition itself in the pre-implementation stage. 
• During vendor evaluation, due to information asymmetry as vendors typically try to sell the “hot stuff” available and do not take completely into account the organization’ need, organizations may not be in a position to make right choices , hence wrong vendor and technology selection may happen.  
• Lack of preparation by the HR team: Once an implementation partner is chosen, the organizations go along with what the partner brings to the table, more often losing focus on critical areas such Job Profiling, Competency Mapping, Talent Management linkages, integration points and data extraction, cleansing and reconciliation approaches. This generally results in half baked work done by the implementation partner who is not well versed with these specific organizational processes.  
• Lack of monitoring and health checks: Most of the implementations do have a monitoring mechanism in the form of steering committees but these committees generally operate at a very high level mostly handling coordination and conflict resolution. There is no hands-on independent health check of the implementation at critical milestones leading to cascading of critical issues towards the end of implementation lifecycle. This generally results in chaos during the User Acceptance and Go Live stages of the project. Going live is a tumultuous experience for most of the organizations due to lack of advanced assessment of all aspects of production readiness.  
• Lack of understanding on the right reporting: The reports delivered with the HR standard products are very generic in nature and do not cater to specific reporting requirements for specific roles in the organization. Selection of right KPIs relevant for the industry is generally given a miss by the implementation partner. Clearly spelling out the reporting requirement is critical for right management reporting and right level of decision making support at levels of management. This is also one most of the most important measures of the success of technology implementation 
• Change management is another area where organizations usually are under-prepared. Moreover, incumbent vendor may not have necessary skill sets to advise clients for the same. In most cases, organizations start on this critical process too late in their project life-cycle considering it as an end of lifecycle activity. As a result, after implementation, organizations may not realize the necessary benefits of the new technology due to lack of user adoption.
• Value Assessment: During post implementation stabilization phase, organizations fail to measure the return on their investment and effectiveness of technology implementation. This result in organizations losing interest in the implementation as a source of competitive advantage and use it only as a tactical tool for administering the workforce.