Module 8 - Part 2 Implementation and Post-Implementation Issues

Part 2

1. What did you learn? Did you enjoy the class?

Unexpectedly, this ended up being one of the most enjoyable online classes I have taken so far.  I think this is because problem solving is so relatable to our everyday work lives.   The problem solving and introductory project management skills and tools introduced are immediately applicable.  I appreciate how the class was a journey based on how to solve very real life situations.  The journey took us through territory that can be intimidating (software analysis, project management, creating wikis and other unfamiliar technologies, facing problems head on and directly) but the modules broke the process down in very manageable, easily digestible chunks. 

I don’t think of myself as being very tech-savvy - so this class was intimidating to me.  By learning how to take software and analyze it systematically, I feel much more confidant in my ability to tackle problems using tech solutions, specifically harnessing tech to work for me, not against me.

Finally, while the class was targeted to HR, the problem solving skills and tools introduced in the class can obviously be used universally.

Key take-aways and learning moments for me included:

• The new gig economy, or Hollywood model
• Understanding the difference between Core HRIS/System of Record (SOR) vs. Talent Management software/niche software
• Note to self - explore project management in more detail
• Finally - never stop learning and exposing oneself to new tech!  Keep an open mind as some of it will be good, some not so good, but more importantly, the minute we stop actively learning we are functionally falling behind (Did You Know - Shift Happens)

I am definitely going to bookmark and reference the following tools specifically:

• www.softwareadvice.com
• Problem Charter
• Charter Based Software Analysis
• DICE

2.  When all else fails, what should you focus on?

Focus on the customer and your business case (from your Problem Charter).

Module 8 - Part 1 Implementation and Post-Implementation Issues

1.  Why is a software's delivery model so important?
   Delivery models, the basic two being cloud based (SaaS) vs. on-premise, are an important decision in selecting your software implementation, as there are many pros and cons to both models.  There is no straight forward right or wrong answer, so a vital part of any software purchasing decision for a company of any industry and size is to weight the pros and cons of each and then make the decision based on what works for their specific business model, internal resources, and culture.  
   At Smartbridge’s - a enterprise business consulting firm - website www.smartbridge.com, I found two matrices that can be used to help the decision analysis process.  The first weighs pros and cons and I created a simplified version below:
   
   

   ASPECT	SAAS	ON-PREMISE
   Implementation	Faster	Takes time, personnel and equipment Additional hardware/software purchases may be needed.
   Customization	May or may nor be possible	Most flexible option for customization.
   Support & Maintenance	Minimal IT dependency for application maintenance Control relinquished to the third party vendor - there may be trust issues	You/ your IT are responsible for maintaining the application; availability, etc. Offers control over data and provides greater sense of ownership
   Upgrade Cycles	Tend to be iterative with your limited involvement	You own the responsibility for upgrades, which are often expensive and time-consuming.
   Cost	Low entry Maintenance cost relatively high year over year Low internal resources required Low upgrade costs	High entry and operations costs compared to SaaS due to infrastructure and support staff needs. Low ongoing maintenance fee upgrade costs high
   Security	With hight end vendors, SaaS can be highly secure	Additional time and software for security required.
   Validation for Regulatory Compliance	Vendor will provide a baseline validation for your review	You will be responsible for the full validation effort.Enforcing regulatory requirements is easier compared to Multitenant SaaS due to complete control of the environment.
   Integrations	Can get complicated as data will be sent over the internet	Simpler and faster
   Scalability	Easy	Needs longterm planning and commitment of resources for scaling.

      
   
   
   The second Matrix can be used to document and compare longterm costs and can be found here: http://smartbridge.com/pros-cons-saas-vs-premises-deployment/
   
   
2. How do you ensure that your problem is solved successfully?

There will invariably be issues, roadblocks, and problems with any new technology implementation.  Additionally, some  team members and customers will not be open to change, further muddying the waters.  It would be easy to slip into the mindset that the solution was a failure.  The key to ensuring that the original problem is solved successfully, is to go back and refer to the original problem charter. 

Check out the problem statement as well as the in scope issues.  Have these seen improvement?  If the answer is yes, then things are headed in the right direction.  It is important not to experience “scope creep” meaning trying to solve out of scope issues along with the in scope.  Everyone involved may not remember exactly what is in and out of scope so this may need to be addressed on occasion when there are complaints.  For example, criticism related to out of scope issues may need to be “parked” for a future upgrade or even a new problem solution.  This should be clearly communicated to shareholders. 

The success metrics specifically will be objective measures of success. Go through one by one and see how many have been achieved.

Success to some sponsors will also mean staying within budget and duration so these should be revisited as well. 

Module 7 - Part 2 Your HR Problem and Pre-implementation

1.  Why is the problem charter and project management, in general, important, and what role do they serve in our problem solving efforts?

Project management is essential for efficiency and maintaining focus on the objectives at hand.  It keeps all participants on track, moving forward and not wasting energy by going off on tangents.  Tangents waste time, money, and lead to frustration, discouragement and bickering among project team members and the end result will be unhappy, unsatisfied sponsors. Sponsors and leadership usually provide the budget so it is of paramount importance that they are happy!

The Problem Charter is a specific tool used in project management.  It is a snapshot, or overview, of the problem at hand, resources, and a key implementation step.  It's purpose is to define a problem and outline the steps that needs to be taken to solve the problem.  Steps such as the Success Metrics section ensure that results are measurable in an objective way.  It also serves as an organized document to present to senior management; it shows there are measurable deliverables that are forthcoming, as well as demonstrates knowledge of hurdles and barriers that need to be overcome to achieve the deliverables.

2.  In your own words, describe the HR software world and its players. What products are you familiar with, and what products intrigue you?

The HR Software world can be divided into two categories: Best of Suite and Best of Breed.

Suite Solutions typically sacrifice features in order to get a single vendor solution.  This "all in one" HRMS solution provides a suite of applications that enable businesses to manage their human capital.  They, like ERP software, house a database, from which the other processes pull information.   Typically they will provide some combination of the following core HR functions and strategic HR functions: 

• Recruiting
• Applicant tracking
• Reference collection and tracking
• Time and Attendance tracking
• Payroll
• Performance Management 
• Compensation Planning
• Learning Management
• Talent Management
• Onboarding
• Goal tracking
• Offboarding
• Succession and Workforce Planning 
• Benefit administration / Wellness
• Reporting / Analytics

Best of Breed software provide the above functions as single packages of software.  They are individually more robust and powerful, but the downside is, they are more costly all purchased separately and may not integrate well with each other.

I am familiar with the ATS, Time/Attendance/Payroll, and Wellness software that my current company uses.  The rest of the functions are performed using our ERP, Oracle except for benefits, which we outsource.

Specifically, I would find exploring the following "best of breed" solutions interesting since we currently use Oracle for them and I find it clunky, tedious and time consuming to use:

- Performance Management

- Learning Management

- Succession and workforce Planning

Module 7 - Part 1 Your HR Problem & Pre-implementation

1. Based on your assessment, did you find a solution?  Yes - I have decided to use PMWiki as a short term (1-2 year) solution and longterm, convince our corporate IS Department to implement the much larger, more expensive, and more enterprise friendly Microsoft SharePoint.
2. How confident are you in your chosen solution? I'm confident.  SharePoint is a solution that will solve a lot of our of scope problems along with our in scope problem. Ideally, it should be implemented by our IS Department to be used by the entire corporation.  We are already a Microsoft house, so this should be something that will integrated easily with our current enterprise systems.  This upside of this plan, for our group, is that we will have in house support (our IS team) more readily available, as they will be providing support company wide.  The downside is that for a company of our size (around 6000 employees worldwide) the implementation timeline is a little longer than I would like to wait.  As such, we will use PMWiki as an interim solution.  It is free, easy and quick to implement, and I'm fairly certain we can transfer the page content that we create in PMWiki to Sharepoint when it goes live. 
3. Given your current problem, what barriers to success do you foresee?

I foresee the following barriers to implementing PMWiki:

• Educating and training our managers to seek and utilize the portal once introduced to it (and not resort to simply reaching out to HR for the answers.

• Education and training HR Team members to not spoon feed info to managers.  Instead, training Team to direct managers to the appropriate wiki page so they can find the knowledge source on their own and find it again in the future.
• Keeping processes refined, up-to-date, and in alignment with parallel corporate processes.

     4.  Utilizing the DICE framework, given the barriers that you see, what steps can you take to minimize the risk of failure of your change efforts?

Duration (D)

either the total duration of short projects, or the time between two milestones on longer projects

Team Performance Integrity (I)

the project team's ability to execute successfully, with specific emphasis on the ability of the project leader

Commitment (C)

levels of support, composed of two factors:

C1 visible backing from the sponsor and senior executives for the change

C2 support from those who are impacted by the change

Effort (E)

how much effort will it require to implement (above and beyond business as usual)

Calculation of Dice Score (from wikipedia.org)

D + (2x I) + (2x C1) + C2 + E =

My Dice Calculation:

2 + (2x1) + (2x 1) + 2 + 2 =

Score results:

7-14 = WIN

14-17 =WORRY

> 17 = WOE

My Sore:

10 = WIN

Calculate DURATION

< 2  Months = 1

2-4 Months = 2

4-8 Months = 3

> 8  Months = 4

Calculate Team Performance INTEGRITY 

Very Good = 1

Good = 2

Average = 3

Poor =4

Calculating Senior Management COMMITMENT 

Clearly and strongly communicate the need = 1

Seems to want to success = 2

Neutral = 3

Reluctant = 4

Calculating Local COMMITMENT

Eager = 1

Willing = 2

Reluctant = 3

Strongly Reluctant = 4

Calculating EFFORT

< 10%      Additional = 1

10 - 20 % Additional = 2

20 - 40 % Additional = 3

> 40%      Additional = 4

Module 6 - HR software Analysis

• As discussed in Module 1, the future of work will require that a successful HR professional have business acumen, technology savviness,  and project management and execution skills.  Why do you think that is?


Getting straight to the point - it is essential that Human Resources as a function keep pace with the technology that the rest of the core business units use.  Other core business functions such as Finance and Marketing are, as a whole, comfortable with using analytics, numbers, and hard data to develop strategy.  In order to keep a "seat at the table", Human Resources needs to do the same. Human Resources has developed a bit of a reputation for relying on soft data and gut feelings to drive strategy.  In order to overcome this, current HR professionals need to step up their game and, not just keep up, but drive change through true partnership with Finance and Executive Leadership.  This will only happen by speaking their language.  As more transactional tasks are outsourced or completed via self-service, HR's challenge is to not be viewed as overhead.  Like all corporate functions, HR needs to constantly question and validate how they are adding value to the business divisions.  These days, they will succeed by acquiring and developing business acumen, tech savviness, project management and execution skills.




• With the shift of technology to a more collaborative web 2.0 world, how has technology impacted your life and made it better?


Personally, technology has helped me in two ways.  First, my family is scattered across the country.  I am more connected to family using Facebook, Facetime, and IM than I would be otherwise.  Without these tools, connecting would involve letters, phone calls and personal visits. Not many young folks are very prolific with letter writing these days so I doubt that medium would keep me connected to my younger cousins!  I am not a big fan of talking on the phone, so that would not be my go-to communication method and, finally, cross country visits are expensive and time consuming.


The second way that technology has helped me is enabling me to continue my education while also working full time by taking online classes.  I still enjoy actually visiting a campus and attending lectures the "old fashioned" way so a mix of online and classroom education has been my preference.  That being said, attending classes on campus is a bit of a luxury as an adult - it is difficult to work a full time-job, take care of a family, and carve out the time during the day to commute to and from and attend in-person classes.  Berkeley Extension not only offers online classes, but the Learning Management System (LMS) that they use, Canvas, has a great mobile format.  I don't even need wifi or my laptop to check assignments timelines, view lectures, or chat with classmates as I can do it all from my smartphone!  I take Caltrain to work, so this is the perfect window of time that I have to myself where i can login in on my phone and get about 30 minutes of classwork done.  A true timesaver - thank you Berkeley Extension!

Module 5 - Software Delivery Models and Technology Trends

Software Delivery Models and Technology Trends

Graphic: http://www.esi.mil/saas_toolkit/pricing_models.html

• How do you think the delivery model is going to affect any new developments in technology?

The delivery models, on-premise and Saas, will affect new technology developments in several ways, which will in turn, be a boon for the consumer; consumers of technology will have many more options available to them than they ever had with the original, older delivery model of on-premise. 
Developers and manufacturers of on-premise software will be forced by new market pressure from Saas providers, to take what they do best, and do it even better, in order to stay competitive.  For example, on-premise software is has the reputation for being more secure than the cloud, so providers will need to separate themselves from competing on-premise providers by excelling  in and focusing on security. Likewise, they are known for customizing and targeting software exactly to their customers specific requirements.  In the future, this needs to, not only continue, but improve, perhaps by providing superior customer support after the initial sale.  In addition, on-premise software is not known to have frequent or inexpensive upgrades available because of this customization level.  Again, to stay competitive, they will need to convince their customers they will be providing up to date upgrades in a timely manner and at a competitive price.  

Saas providers will be taking what they already do well and taking it to the next level; more modern usability interfaces, providing a superior user experience that requires little up front training and staying of the leading edge of new tech developments and maintain the agility to provide their customers access to them.  
In terms of integration with other systems that organizations use, Saas could stand to improve in this area.  Therefore, new developments for Saas technology will include improved integrations capabilities with other systems, for example other ERPs.

Pricing over the long term seems to be about the same between teh two delivery models.  Obviously there is higher up front cost with on-premise, but over time, say 5 years or so, the total costs roughly equal subscription costs for Saas systems.  I'm sure this varies widely; by software type, industry, and many other variables, but if I had to predict predict the impact of Saas availability on cost; I would anticipate that on-premise software providers will have to consider changing their pricing model.  It may be difficult for them to compete with Saas low buy-in cost and more consistent year to year cost.

• What do you think of the future of on-premise technology?

It will likely never completely go away, because it does serve certain purposes and it is highly customizable. They may be certain very high security industries such as government agencies and healthcare that will always use some on p-premise technology.

Here are some facts from William Blair & Company, 2007:  

• 25% of new business delivered via SaaS by 2011, up from 5% in 2005
• Aberdeen:  70% of 631 companies surveyed are looking at or planing to use SaaS

• In your opinion, what delivery model will be able to respond better to the  three trends of social, mobile, and global?

Saas will come out ahead here. Social, mobile and global trends have one thing in common and that is they change frequently.  SaaS software many not cost less over all than on-premise, but:

• Saas can be implemented more quickly
• Saas facilitates more frequent improvements and releases
• Saas facilitates a better understanding of the customer/user.

• How will the trends of social, mobile, and global translate itself to HR software?  In other words, can you provide an example of how these three trends can benefits HR departments now and in the future?

One of the biggest and most obvious impacts will be on Talent Acquisition.  Social and mobile recruiting will be the way of the future for sure.  Talent Acquisition departments need to have the agility and software required to provide a candidate experience via mobile devices.

Total Reward Departments, as well and Learning and Development, will be transformed by global requirements.  Industry training regulations, Quality standards, and benefits programs will all need to be tailored by region and country.  Organizations will need powerful and nimble technology to keep pace with all these individualized requirements and reporting standards.  Reports will need to be prepared accurately and quickly.  Saas technology will provide the nimbleness and on-premise software will probably be needed for the short term future to provide the security requirements needed.  Additionally, Saas systems may not work as well in countries that are not yet consistent in their network capabilities.

Even areas such as engagement will take advantage of social and mobile trends.  The way we communicated with our friends and family - this can be mirrored with internal social networks that are accessed by mobile devices.  Inexpensive mobile devices may even be provided to first line, entry level manufacturing employees, who may not otherwise have access to mobile.  One example of this I have seen (but not used myself) is Beekeeper.