So you’re rolling out a global HRIT strategy. Perhaps this means you are putting the entire enterprise on a global recruiting system, or you will ask each business unit and country to provide data to a global data warehouse, or even more extreme, perhaps you are forcing all of your businesses to go onto a single global HRMS solution. Whatever it is, I see more and more organizations trying to do something with global HR data. The driving factor usually seems to be one of three common things: cost saving, process standardization, or data retrieval. Whatever the reasons (some of which are quite dubious in terms of actual achievement rates) you’ll be asking your global partners to do a lot of work.
Whenever any of these changes takes place, your global partners end up implementing, changing business processes, sacrificing local control and even local compliance, and becoming a slave to your central function’s ability to provide functional enhancements on a timely basis. The all realize that while centralizing some HRIT provides vast benefits for the enterprise as a whole, the local benefits are often limited or displaced by extra local work or cost that is incurred. It’s no surprise that support is often hard to come by when you have global projects.
Often, I’m asked to be involved in a project after it has kicked off. Sometimes the organization has already decided to head down a specific path, and I’m asked to help with the planning or detailed design process. One of the first things I always ask is where the divisional, regional, or business unit stakeholders sit in the project. I don’t really ever expect to have a captive audience at all times when we’re talking about VP level people, but if they have not been bought into the process at an early stage, any later stages should be considered at full risk.
Ideally, your global executive stakeholders have been not only informed early, but also involved in major (high level) design considerations and have been asked to approve early high level design and approach for the overall project. Their buy-in both from a philosophy/strategy level and a feasibility level will ensure their unit’s willing participation in future stages.
I understand that there are large costs associated with bringing in stakeholders at key milestones early in a project. Many organizations don’t want to waste executive time on projects that may not even be approved yet. However, not getting this early input is completely destructive later on when you get to implementing. Don’t sabotage yourself by shortcutting at the planning stage. It’s one of the things that fills my projects with the most grief, but is completely avoidable.
