Success Depends on You, Not The Vendor!

ADP, Ceridian, Kronos, Oracle, SAP SuccessFactors, Ultimate Software, Workday and several others are names of familiar Human Capital Management (HCM) solutions in the market today. They all have the full suite of HCM, Time and Payroll functionality that is fundamental for any corporation. Each of these software companies spend a significant amount of money on research and development. All have able sales professionals incented to convince you that their solution is the best for you. The quandary is how do you tell what software solution is best for you?

The simple answer is that each of the solutions mentioned above have the “capability” of providing you exactly what you need. The difficult part is how well you know what you need. The path towards finding the right solution for your company starts by understanding your requirements. This arduous process if often skipped in favor of moving forward with a “one-size must fit all” mentality to requirements definition. The outcome of this process where requirements are averaged to a vanilla, or “best-practice” capability often results in companies who are frustrated that payroll cannot support paying the same person in two different states doing two different jobs, or disappointed that their timekeeping system does not allow workers to opt out of breaks, or disappointed that the transition to their new HCM solution resulted in losing all historical employment information.

More often than not, companies end up getting exactly what they don’t want, with the failure stemming from not being clear what they required from their new solution. Regardless of what you have heard, every software company has clients who are not happy with their deployed solution. These “failures” arise from implementation mistakes, inadequate testing, inferior integrations and sundry other issues that stem from a variety of software, personnel and service deficiencies. The good news is that these shortcomings are relatively small, but since no one wants to fall short of anticipated outcomes there are a few steps you can take to ensure that your next HCM solution meets expectations.

Not surprisingly the first and most important step is having a plan. Understand what you are trying to accomplish and develop a strategy defining who is involved, what you want to accomplish, when you are seeking to transition to a new system, where you want to focus your energy and how you are going to take steps to get people involved. Establishing timeline, team members, deployment priorities and supporting infrastructure sets the foundation for any transition effort.

The second step to successful transition to a new HCM solution is to understand what business needs you want to address. This is where requirements gathering and customer validation is essential to set priorities for change. Gain input from internal stakeholders and make an effort to identify specific business issues that must be addressed. Any transformation effort that fails to impact previously identified problems will be viewed negatively and diminish on-going support.

Third, understand that the implementation effort is critical to realizing the full value of any solution. The best software can be deployed poorly resulting in negative outcomes for all parties. Vendor-led, third-party and internal teams can all fail if they have poor leadership, inadequate training and limited tools to support communication and collaboration through the implementation process. Strong governance, expert configuration support and interactive design/deployment characterize successful solution execution.

Finally, understand that most transformation efforts involve both system and services. Many HCM vendors have great software, but very few have a strong service contingent to help support their clients through the deployment effort and into post go-live support and service delivery. If you require on-going support to deliver services to your organization a software-only vendor will be inadequate. Understanding how much hand-holding and service support you will need on an on-going basis varies from organization to organization, but any software with no services will be lacking.

So which vendor will provide you the best opportunity to realize success in your HCM deployment efforts? The answer ultimately depends on you.