Can you really do away with Excel sheets?

Once you have the process in place, got the budget approved and have identified the list of products, you will next focus on product fitment. This is the wooing phase; I like to call it the honeymoon phase. The business teams have this great vision and you have a line of vendors promising you the world and more. Practicality, budget limitations and other nasty impediments arrive later as the project gets closer to the contracting phase.

However, you can make the most of the positive vibes flowing in this phase if you keep in mind a few simple things:

1.Prioritize your needs. Have a clear idea of which parts of your process are in critical need of technical enablement. Then go for the solution / product that excels in those areas. A good-looking, state of the art product with advanced features is of no use if it can’t deliver on the basic needs of the process.
2.Have a long term view. You will be investing in the product anywhere from 3-5 years. So think about how your organization and your business process will evolve in those years. Find out if the product is scalable and flexible to accommodate your growth and process changes.
3.Get the actual users to be part of the process. More often than not, the decision making on a new technology remains restricted to senior HR managers and the IT department. Making the actual end users part of the process will give a real picture of the usability of the product as well as make change management a lot easier when the product is finally rolled out. The only caution here is bear in mind that users can some time get into the nitty-gritties of the process which can become too detailed and can take the focus away from big picture.
4.Keep the big picture in mind. Think about your organization’s overall technology landscape and strategy. At the end of the day, systems have to work together to make the organization tick. Ensure that the new technology will interface well with the remaining systems and can send and receive data as required.
5. And finally, be practical. Don’t try to achieve much more than what you need. Your users are not going to get rid of excel sheets and will continue to use them. In fact, no other tool till date beats the convenience of getting a data snapshot in a spreadsheet for analysis and error checking. So expect some part of manual processing to remain and do not aim for a system that can run on autopilot.

Do you have your process defined?

I am reading my blog posts (yes, it has been so long since I blogged that I have lost track!) – and thinking, how did I forget process definition?! Turns out, I didn’t miss out on process definition, but went with the assumption the process has already been defined. Going by my experience since I wrote the last blog, I realize that is not the case, especially so with the start-ups. HR processes have their own evolution curve. Most organizations start off with adhoc processes with a “whatever that works” policy, because HR is not their core and they are absolutely right in doing so in that stage of the organization. However, as the organization grows and crosses that invisible threshold, the need to create a defined policy and process emerges.
Process definition is definitely the foremost step even prior to considering budget or getting into evaluating technology options. Without a defined process, it is quite easy to get lost within the technology landscape. I have seen many companies first pick the technology vendor then look into what process they have in place. The vendor’s promise that they have a “standard process” in place looks too good and the organizations take the bait and decide to go with the standard process based on best practices.
I come from the school of thought that there is no one best practice, especially when it comes to HR. HR processes evolve depending on the organization’s culture and the kind of people involved in executing the process and the country (or even the state or the county) to which the organization belongs. Thus one standard process cannot work well for all. What the vendors sell is usually a configurable product that allows only a defined set of configuration variations.
If you really want your HR processes to empower and extract the highest performance out of your people, you should invest in the right place – defining sound HR processes and then go looking for technology options to enable the process.