Implementation
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Maintaining Cadence
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In cycling, one of the core concepts when you are trying to maintain good “form” is the maintenance of cadence. Basically, a cyclist is most efficient when the legs are spinning at around 90 to 110 cycles per minute. The idea is that for each pedal stroke, a certain number of watts must be generated…
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Users First, Company Second
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I feel like I always talk about change management and adoption. When implementing a new system, I can definitely say that over the last few years I’ve seen a marked improvement in the diligence of internal implementation project managers in stressing the importance of behavioral change and end user adoption. It is honestly so easy…
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Change Management, HR Service Delivery, HR Strategy, HR Technology, Implementation, Service Delivery, Vendors
Support versus Change, Evolution versus Revolution
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Jacob Morgan wrote a piece about adoption a while back, and he had a pretty interesting concept around supporting business process as opposed to change management. This is really quite new to me, as we’ve always talked about change management and behavioral change as opposed to a softer concept of “support.” You need to speak…
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System of Record: Everything in its Place
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I’m sitting on a plane (delayed of course for 4 hours) thinking about the people around me. I have the fabulous exit row seat on the A319 where there is no seat in front of me. The guy in the middle next to me is great. He’s not a talker, he’s slim, does not intrude…
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The Vendor Demo Test Drive
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I must say that Jim Holincheck wrote a quite persuasive piece a couple months ago on why vendor scripted demos will go away. In today’s environment of SaaS applications, it’s so much easier for organizations to set up sandboxes for potential customers to play around in rather than the old model where client server applications…
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UFO’s: Unfinished Objects
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I’m not sure who first coined the term “shelfware.” Most of our IT departments have all sorts of stuff we have purchased that we intend to implement but just haven’t done so yet. Or we have implementations that we have abandoned, or we have technology and strategy roadmaps that are mid way through because we…
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Implementation and the “Personal Win”
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We always end up talking about employee adoption whenever we are implementing anything whether it’s technology, process or anything else. When we talk about adoption, we’re really talking change management, and in that we are talking about changing both behaviors of people as well as attitudes. We want to convert both their minds as well…
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Translating HR Data Elements globally
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Global HR data is tough. Often times when we’re thinking about implementing a global core HR system, or a global data warehouse, we implement these systems according to a U.S. centric view of the world. (I’ll note here that I once worked with a U.K. based company that looked at their core HR system with…
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Data Hubs versus Business Intelligence
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I keep seeing organizations that try to use their data warehouse platforms as data hubs. While on the surface this might seem like a good idea, it really might not be depending on your utilization of each. The data warehouse serves primarily as a business intelligence and analytics tool. If implemented correctly, it contains vast…
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Large Investments in Technology
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Perhaps I’m just a nerd, but I’ve been following the developments of the Hadron Collider for a while now. In terms of physics, there have been many theories abounding, but with the lack of ability to look into the tiniest known particles within an atom and see how they re/act, it’s quite impossible to find…
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Complex Problem Solving and Change Management
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Serious hat tip to Rob Millard Rob wrote about this over 2 years ago, but the picture still exists and I stumbled upon it months ago, and then had a second look a couple weeks ago. Rob pointed me to an intriguing picture that I’ve had to think about for a while. Rather than using…
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HBR on Service Oriented Architecture
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Far be it for feeble minded me to critique HBR’s SOA article entitled “Then Next Revolution in Productivity,” ((HBR June 2008, pg 73)) but that’s what I’ll do anyway. While I’m a firm believer that SOA and that we’ll see high levels of SOA adoption in the upcoming years, I’m skeptical that this is the…
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Why HR Can’t Implement Web 2.0
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Joel Cheeseman wrote an interesting piece on Web 2.0 a couple months ago in the Industry Insider. An outsider is led to believe such cutting-edge tactics in the employment space are the rule. In reality, it’s the exception. The percentage of companies publishing blogs full of embedded YouTube videos, Flickr photos, a roll call of…
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Pet Peeves Translated to HR 1
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So it’s obvious that writing a daily blog is weighing heavily on the writer. What does one write about…? However, my daily grind is weighing even more heavily and there are a few things that bug me that I really want to write about. However, since this blog is about HR, I have to tie…
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Future State: The Business Analyst as Coder
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Will the need for someone writing code ever disappear? Perhaps the real question is not if, but when this will happen. We do things today that we would not have dreamed of just fire or six years ago. Today, our portals allow users to customize the look and feel of their interface, to provide data…
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Developing an Application For Yourself
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Oracle coded their compensation workbench so they could use it themselves. It’s the best module in their HR suite. What a novel idea to create an application you think is good enough to use yourself. There are other models of course. SuccessFactors and other SaaS organizations now have a healthy record of coding and being…
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Why Technology Projects Fail 2
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Your technology project is completed. Your go live date is imminent. You have committed serious time and effort to changing your processes, and making sure they get implemented in your new technology appropriately. Your delivery method is changing and people will need to use the new processes, portals, and workflows starting tomorrow. Suddenly you realize…
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Why Technology Projects Fail 1
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You take on a project to change something in your organization. If you’re reading this, often you’ll be implementing some sort of technology. Why do projects fail? Often, it’s because there is no change in processes prior to implementing technology. After all, why would you implement technology to change your underlying delivery model, but not…
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Enabling versus Empowering
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In HRIT we spend so much time implementing and rolling out systems that we implicitly know that change management is an important part of any implementation. Vendors usually provide training, and communications are a well known part of any roll-out process. The question is whether these are enough. The answer is an absolute “no.” We’ve…
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Agility Methods and Project Governance
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Governance and scope creep is always one of the major problems in any project. Limited resources and continuous demand from non-project needs both elongate projects and spread resources too thin. I was speaking with a technology friend about project governance methods and he pointed out that his organization used a strict “agility method” that I…