3 New Year’s Resolutions for Your HRMS Project

Happy New Year! Out with the old and in with new, it’s a time for fresh starts and improved ways of doing things. If you’re an HRMS project manager, now is the perfect time to evaluate your performance during the past year and to bring in some improvements. Are you ready for some new year’s resolutions? Here are top areas to consider changing as we move forward in the new year:

1) Assess staffing based on current state

Do you recognize this phrase: ‘Just let me close out the year and then I’ll look into it?’ While resources may shift for various reasons and you sometimes need to make due with less than full staffing, now is the time to take a fresh look at everyone and their roles. Are you offering enough of a challenge to keep staff? Are employees being cross-trained and getting that valuable knowledge transfer from outside consultants? The beginning of the year is a good time to make a clean break if you need to move around employees or change operating procedures.

2) Refocus on supporting the HR strategy

How often do we make 10 year plans and technology roadmaps only to abandon them after the budget funding is achieved? Or even when our HRMS project plans are followed and up-to-date, the HR landscape can suddenly shift due to acquisitions, divestitures or changing business needs. January is the perfect time to step back and ensure that your HRMS strategy is current and that it aligns with the overall HR strategic goals.

I recently saw a case where an HRMS implementation of a candidate mining application was under budget and on-time . . . but no longer relevant as the part of the business that originally sponsored it has since been sold. Rather than pulling the plug and re-allocating project resources and avoiding the on-going license fees, the project continued on, a successful implementation that was never adopted or used once live.

3) Ensure documentation is relevant and ready

System and training documentation is historically one of the first items to get delayed or deferred when a project needs to recalibrate for time overages. In addition, I’ve noticed in the past years as many companies have gone to hosted HRMS solutions that documentation is especially challenging due to the frequent and rapid software updates and can quickly go stale. System documentation, however, is particularly relevant in this day and age of outsourcing, near-shoring and making do with fewer internal resources. As well, audit and compliance requirements continue to be far reaching, especially for businesses who provide goods or services to governments or are involved in global operations where other statutory and legal requirements can be far-reaching.