HR technology enhancement is one major big key element to get HR Services tasks done in a more effective and efficient way. Many organizations misunderstand this approach by investing million dollars into over-engineered HR systems. A massive re-inventing is accompanied with exaggerated project teams and a long exhausting project environment pushing Go Live into the uncertain future. These kinds of initiatives are mostly driven and funneled through the IT department. As a result, IT is perceived as a bottleneck with its limited capabilities which influence the overall business success to most.
Current state is too slow for today’s pace
IT related HR Services projects often have a retained fate. Six-months waits for the business to Go-Live being involved in exhausting resource-eating project machine without any success on the project long-trail chart isn’t acceptable anymore. HR can offer for such a misery a very simple solution: Provide an agile and business-driven environment to enhance technology for business purposes.
Change is a constant in the work environment of today
A strong and aligned relationship between IT and HR Services is crucial to the success of a people focused organization. The interactions can be drilled down to a very operational and frequent exchange to move things much faster.
Being HR, you should not push the IT team for a new recruitment system. Sit together and discuss your business pain points. It’s not a business task to find a stand-alone solution, but business should be clear in prioritizing their needs. Activating united forces, business and IT need to transform the described needs into tasks and to aligned on due dates. Using daily sync meetings, IT can update the community about the status and technical progress and also can address further needs of clarification.
Being IT, don’t hide behind the „open task list“ in delivering the desired changes without any feedback loop. The continuous adaption and change of this master list is key working in an agile model. If not, the whole organization will end up as described before, having long release cycles and unsatisfied business. As change is a constant in this working mode, IT should always be prepared that business might change their priorities in the worst case from one day to another.
Agile work on a daily base
The daily check-ins between HR and IT don’t need big resources and can be done in 15 minutes. Every progress must be tracked using a shared protocol which is the base for every check-in meeting. From HR, the individual subject matter expert (SME) sit with the correlated IT consultant and share the progress with their overall leadership team and also with their teams to work on the progress.
In case you have IT consultants within your HR organization translating business needs into IT language: Transform these roles into more value-adding roles to manage the agility in the HR and IT partnership or get rid of them. Your subject matter experts (SME) know the best, what is needed and to support the IT consultants to translate the needs into tasks. Otherwise, you will have a great paradox within your organization when it comes to agile working.
From a strategy perspective, HR and IT should also establish the same alignment which is done at the operational level at the senior management team level. This includes aligned business decisions about system substitutions or to propose escalation outcomes.
All in all, a fruitful relationship between HR and IT is tricky, but also the key to be successful as an overall organization. HR is dependant on the work IT is doing and IT is dependent that HR keeps them busy. Accordingly, the senior management team must accept that the roles & responsibilities are clear prior to change the work mode to agile.
What’s next?
You are curious, how today’s HR department should draw their system landscape and how the interactions between these systems can be achieved using agile working? Contact me in case you need your HR processes aligned with the system landscape to start the agile work mode today and not tomorrow.
Please contact me: oliver@hr-digital-now.de
