Systematic & Efficient Planning for Your HRIS Project…

In one of my earlier postings, BEFORE searching for a new HRIS system, several reasons were presented for rethinking the approach to obtaining a HRIS system…

to provide improved budget management

to seek the right questions

to gain more efficient use of resources

to develop optimized fit between system and company

to develop a systematic and efficient methodology

to build moral within the company and within the project

to utilize weaknesses as seeds for creating strengths

To start…

All business processes, documented or not, should be reviewed with the following focus…

what is working now and provides beneficial efficiencies?

what is an improvement in these beneficial efficiencies, if any?

what tasks repetitive and / or redundant?

what is not working and provides inefficiencies and difficulties?

what new processes and ideas would increase effectiveness and efficiencies?

what business process recommendations have been recommended by the employees?- what needs to improve? what may no longer be necessary?

what tasks are especially cumbersome and distracts employees from their work?

In many traditional cases, the focus is on the processes in the system as many, if not all, the questions are focused on the needs of the system. Such an approach is a seed for the system to be THE determining factor in many things. Before looking at or choosing any system, why not ask questions that are focused on the needs of the company instead? Would not such an approach be giving the company the control of the selection process instead of the machine determining business processes?

Let’s familiarize – you need to buy a new appliance for your home, say a clothes washer. Before searching for a new machine, you already know what you want it to do (besides the obvious – washing clothes). You may want it to have multiple wash programs, multiple rinse cycles, capable of hot water at various temperatures; with some models you may even want it to dry our clothes also… You have determined how much to spend on a machine (your budget). You have basically accomplished the first two set of criteria. From here you can buy the first machine that fits these criteria – or go shopping and to determine from all the machines available, which is the best based on your established needs.

Many have tried and can share their experiences. Looking for systems and seeing if they are the best fit for the company has many unknowns. The traditional approach promotes more questions which in turn require more time to resolve decisions. Many use this approach, because it has many benefits for the simpler systems, but for complex systems like ERP and HRIS, improvements to the approach must be gained. One solution would be to invest our time and resources more wisely in the beginning of the project to ask the right questions to the right people.

When more and more questions are being produced than are being answered, would it not be true the processes are controlling the people?

To manage the processes of high efficiency and best fit, people need to control the processes. This can be achieved through a systematic approach, with the right people being asked the right questions BEFORE searching for your next or first HRIS system. In a future article we will discuss the value of the request for information (RFI) during the discovery process and needs assessment.