HRMS Selection Requirements: Gathering Key Stakeholders

A new HRMS is a major expenditure—to ensure that the best software is selected, a solid round of requirements gathering is essential. Your key stakeholders hold vital details that will be a part of that decision making process. Do you have the right players at the table? Position your HRMS selection for success by ensuring that these stakeholders are involved:

1) Operational HR staff

You daily team of HR Professionals, Business Partners and Administrators who interact with the HRMS or perform HR functions every day have a wealth of knowledge: how processes function, inputs and expected deliverables. As well, they can highlight current system pain points and opportunities for improvement. Disregarding requirements from this team who is ‘deep in the details’ would be disastrous as they are heavy on the requirements needed to get the job done currently.

2) HR Leadership and Executives

HR leaders are often part of the sales cycle or empower HRMS implementations in their role as project sponsors. As such, they often have a strategic direction when it comes to requirements, such as enabling manager or employee self-service to lessen HR administrative work or provide cost savings. While this group won’t necessarily have an in-depth, detailed wish list, as the top HR bosses, their necks are on the line if poor HRMS selection takes place, so their requirements should be considered as a part of the gathering activities.

3) The Reporting Team

Reports and analytics are one of the key benefits of an HRMS. Remember the old ‘garbage in, garbage out’ philosophy? You’ll want to bring your reporting team into requirements gathering to ensure that a new HRMS will be usable from a reporting perspective. As well, you’ll want to get their thoughts on data storage requirements to ensure that the new system is able to deliver a robust level of Business Intelligence reporting for leadership, and a component of that is ensuring that the data exists in the first place.

4) Managers and Employees

Twenty years ago, this population would not have been considered as key stakeholders of an HRMS. Times have changed now with tools such as self-service and manager reporting dashboards. A manager or employee’s perspective can be quite different from our HR view of the world. What is important to this group, mobile apps to be able to approve HR transactions on the go? Or would a manager prefer to have access to customizable reporting dashboard? Now that we expect managers and employees to interact on a daily basis with the HRMS, it’s time to bring them into the key stakeholder group.