A step-by-step guide to project managing your HRMS selection

Project managing an HRMS selection project is a big task. Use this step-by-step guide to figure out what to do when. A free guide from the experts at HRMS World

Are you a seasoned project manager who will be managing an HRMS selection project for the first time? If you’ve never managed an HR project you can be in for a wild ride. Keep these steps in mind as you embark on your HRMS selection journey.

1. Identify key HRMS stakeholders and team members

Similar to any project, you need an executive sponsor to support your activities. Your executive team and your key stakeholders will have the strategic reasons why a new HRMS will be beneficial to the company. Your team members are involved because of their HR expertise so it’s important to recognize and use their contributions as they will be valuable in the next step.

2. Define requirements

Requirements definition is usually the easy part of this exercise. It’s the weighting and ranking of requirements where things can become difficult as everything gets high priority in the first round. It can be helpful to translate numerical ratings into word definitions. Priorities can be simple levels like ‘the business cannot work without it,’ ‘it would improve our efficiency,’ and ‘it’s a nice-to-have feature.’ It’s recommended that you limit any ratings to no more than five options.

Get through being an HRMS project manager unscathed using our step-by-step HRMS selection survival guide

Human resources is by its nature a highly collaborative environment. This phase may take longer than in other areas like finance or technology that are more numbers-based. You can usually be assured that once an agreement is reached that it will then remain firm.

3. Create your vendor shortlist

A vendor shortlist may be up to 10 HRMS providers that you ask to submit responses to a Request for Proposal (RFP). As you receive the responses it is time to whittle down the vendor shortlist to those you’d like to invite for demos, usually no more than five.

It may be worthwhile to bring in an HRMS consultant at this stage to provide a fresh look and impartial feedback. It can help to have someone with technical experience and a product neutral background to bring additional thoughts to the team.

4. Conduct software demos

HRMS demos are an important part of the decision making process. You’ll want to make sure that the relevant HR team members are present and participating to ask the difficult questions. It will be helpful if you’ve organized the HR team in advance to outline a few problematic situations so that each vendor is able to tailor their demo to provide a comparable solution.

5. Make the decision

Once you’ve reached the final stage your role is to compile all of the results received and to facilitate the discussion. In easy cases the team will be in agreement based on what they have seen from the vendors. More difficult decisions may require deep reviews of requirements, vendor answers and functionality.