Most organizations finish their HCM go-live and immediately ask the same question: what modules should we implement next?
It’s a natural instinct but it’s not the best way to go about phase two planning. Because when the roadmap is built around module availability instead of how your business operates, the result is often module overload, incomplete automation, and disjointed processes.
Join Melissa Olson, Director of Infor Solutions, and Theresa Nelson, Director of PMO, as they walk through a process-first approach to phase two and how to prioritize capabilities that drive business outcomes.
They’ll cover the most common traps that lead to module-first decisions, including loud pain points, budget-driven “vending machine” planning, and recency bias from go-live. Attendees will learn how to:
- Map phase two priorities to business outcomes and leadership visibility needs
- Use partial module capabilities across multiple areas to support processes
- Recognize the planning patterns that create technical debt and future risk
- Build a foundation around skills, competencies, and position requirements
- Ask the right questions to find high-impact opportunities
If your HCM phase two plan feels more like a product list than a business strategy, this one’s for you.
Transcript
Melissa Olson
Hi, I’m Melissa Olson, Director of Infor Solutions with RPI Consultants.
Teresa Nelson
And I’m Teresa Nelson, Director of the PMO with RPI Consultants.
Melissa Olson
Today we’re going to get into the mindset of thinking process-based instead of module-based when you look at your phase two, or just talent management module and process implementations.
Teresa Nelson
A very common scenario we run into is you go through the effort of a whole project, you’ve implemented your basic fundamental processes and modules, and it’s time to start thinking about what optimization looks like. You’re moving into wave two.
You’re probably going to be tempted to look at a deck that a salesperson showed you that has a whole number of modules you can do next, and there are a lot of different thought processes people bring to picking what’s next. Oftentimes it’s just availability. And sometimes it’s, well, this team has the time — let’s work on that next.
There are other scenarios we see too. Sometimes it’s just around the people who are loudest — they hate a certain process like performance appraisals and they’re ready to get that started, even though that might not be the best use of time, energy, and budget for automation purposes, or for getting everything off of other products and processes and getting that data into the system.
Melissa Olson
It’s the module-first trap, and it’s funny because this is the way we approached these discussions with our clients in the past too. It really was only in the last year or so — talking with clients and having these conversations — where we’d hear, “Oh, you want to turn this on, but you need a couple of other things to fully finish that process.”
If we’re going to do leave of absence, we can’t just do leave; we also have to do some IDM for documentation, bring in some rolling calendar calculations, and there might be some technical work and maybe custom business classes involved. So how do we get out of that module-first thinking?
Business doesn’t necessarily operate in a way that’s defined by specific modules. Business processes cross functional areas and cross different applications, and the moment we start approaching these projects as looking at a list and trying to check things off, we’re not taking into account the way the business actually runs. Ultimately, you might end up with manual processes that we could have easily automated as part of a broader effort.
We hear this all the time: “We saw this really cool software, we were demoed this really holistic process around the HCM suite, but that’s not what we feel like we have — and we can’t see how to get there from where we are today.”
Teresa Nelson
So here’s that “flip the script” moment. These are some of the comments or questions that people think internally or bring to us: what are some of those process-first mindsets? How do you flip from “we need to implement succession” or “let’s get talent acquisition first because our contract is almost out of time”?
Those are discussions we can help facilitate. You want to think in terms of all the tentacles that come out of a particular process. We have some examples here — take a performance improvement plan. We can look at performance management as part of that, but where else does it spread? Is development planning part of it? Maybe employee relations needs to be part of that as well. There may be key pieces of your process that cross into other modules.
Melissa Olson
So here we’re going to go through some questions that will really help you think about this differently.
Let’s look at our HR processes — specifically the ones we need to move away from because they live on spreadsheets, or at least parts of them do. We hear it everywhere: compensation, merit, incentive comp are all in spreadsheets. But those don’t live in a vacuum. We don’t just decide tomorrow to give somebody a merit increase — that is triggered from performance. And as Teresa was saying earlier, performance can also trigger performance improvement plans.
So now we’re thinking about three different areas where we want to move data into the system, and they’re not module-specific — they’re process-specific. Let’s look at where you have data living outside of the system and think about how those processes can be supported.
The second question to think about is: what outcome are we trying to achieve? A core tenet of project management is to start your planning with the end in mind. Think about what you want to have when this next phase, this optimization, is done. What do you want the system to look like? Starting with that focus rather than starting with a list of possible to-do’s is going to give you a much more complete picture. You may end up with pieces of modules, but in the same way, you’re going to have one complete process in your system.
Teresa Nelson
And then the thing that people often don’t think about — and I’ll tell you who does think about it: the leaders. The people doing the processes don’t often think about what all the data elements are that leadership or the business needs to make decisions. Sometimes the modules you turn on, or your GHR implementation, isn’t capturing all of those data points that, when they’re in a visualization like analytics or some other type of reporting, would be invaluable.
Leadership is not able to say, if we have to do a reorg, how is that going to affect things — how should we move our people around if we have to, unfortunately, do budget cuts? It’s not just resources that need to be cut; it could be programs, it could be other things. But they don’t have that insight into what’s going on in the organization because there are little pieces of data missing to show them the whole picture. We don’t think about it in those terms — that’s not a module and it’s not really even a process. It’s insight and visibility into decision-making data.
Melissa Olson
OK, so you’re live. You’ve got your GHR project done. You did not do a lot of things like skills, competencies, or education — it was really about getting your personnel actions over into the action request, getting all of your resource demographic data in there, getting people paid, taking what you had in your legacy system and bringing it over and transforming it. But you feel like you have time to do some of this nice-to-have work on your positions, work assignments, and resources.
When you skip ahead and say, “We’ll tackle it when we decide to do X module,” you end up thinking: well, I can’t get all the skills in for everybody within this performance management project — we’ve only budgeted X amount of dollars and 6 months to put this in, and doing skills is going to take a lot longer. So we’ll just turn off that part of performance where it looks at position skills. Skipping over all of that has done you a disservice, and concentrating on it now will help you in the future.
Teresa Nelson
And sometimes we see problems where decisions are made that are very specific to a module you want to implement right now, and then you come back later to build onto it and find you’re stuck. You’ve made design decisions that are really specific to this one area, but now as you’re expanding to try to capture the whole business process, you’re pigeonholed.
You’re either going to do a redesign of what you’ve already done, or you’re forced to design your whole process around a few decisions that were made without all the information available — and that’s a tough spot to be in.
Melissa Olson
It is. And going back to that data piece — if you decide to redesign, there goes all of your historical data that you were building for analytics and patterns, because now you’ve redesigned and everything contextually is different.
Teresa Nelson
So we want to go into a couple of scenarios just to get the juices flowing and give you some examples of what we mean when we say we’re using multiple modules but not the full module.
When we’re talking about learning assignments, we’re not saying we’re going to activate the whole learning management module and pull all the skills in the system. What we’re saying is: a manager is tired of chasing supervisors to assign training to people and follow up when it hasn’t been done in the right amount of time — because then your organization isn’t compliant.
Another scenario is onboarding: we know there’s a certain amount of courses and curricula that new employees need on day one, some specific to the organization and some specific to their department or role.
But assigning that learning is very decentralized. So we ask: what can we build out on your position? What are the specific skills and certifications it needs?
Just get that done for regulatory or compliance needs first — you don’t have to do everything at once. Eat the elephant one bite at a time: get the annual assignments in first rather than things that recur every 3 years or are one-and-done. Then build that content out to be delivered in your learning library. You don’t have to subscribe to catalogs and build out all of that learning quite yet — maybe you just start with the regulatory.
Melissa Olson
What you’re saying is so important because it is a shift in focus. You might be going into this thinking you want to build out your entire learning management system, and that’s a really large effort — trying to go deep like that for every single position in your company would be a mammoth implementation. But if you twist your thinking so that instead you’re coming at it from “what area can most benefit from this right now” — instead of building out the whole module, you’re going to look at this and say:
This area could really benefit from automated learning assignments. Let me build it out end to end for them. Let me tie it into performance management. Let me tie it into skills and competencies. Let me build this auto-assigned training — and then you have that as a model you can scale to other parts of your business.
And then the time you free up from people doing this manually is time they can use to set up the next certification or training.
Teresa Nelson
Another one we hear about all the time is performance improvement plans. Where does that live? We have performance management, but we don’t have a place to say: if someone isn’t doing well and gets a lower score, how do we remediate that?
So let’s just turn on part of development planning specifically for performance improvement planning — not career paths, not succession paths, just performance improvement planning. And as mentioned earlier, sometimes employee relations needs to come in if there’s a violation involved. So just turn on those little pieces to support that one process — the annual appraisal. And then you also want to tack on compensation for when it goes well, so you can give merit or an incentive. Here we’re just talking about the needs-improvement side.
Melissa Olson
The last scenario we’ll cover — and there are so many different scenarios we’ve heard from or created for organizations — is onboarding. Most organizations get all the way through: they’ve got talent acquisition in place, the offer-to-hire, they’re turning on transition management, assigning paperwork, and automating that piece. But they’re not taking advantage of potentially assigning those training courses at that same moment.
Put in that probationary period, put in a 90-day performance review, and finish it out. Because when someone is on probation and then moves into their regular annual cycle — based on their 90-day or hire date — think of that as a process. Now we haven’t turned on all of performance management; we’ve just turned on a piece of it to support probationary period reviews.
It prevents the black hole that companies sometimes experience with new hires. And instead of saying, “Let’s bring in onboarding, let’s bring in learning management,” you’re looking at the process to improve the whole experience — and it’s improving the experience for managers too, because it’s bringing in what they need for goal setting as part of that initial onboarding. It’s not something that suddenly surprises your new hires when they get to their 90-day review.
It’s building that foundation. And once again, you could focus on one particular part of the organization, build it out for them, and then roll it out organization-wide.
You could even use not just goals management and performance, but the employee engagement piece — check-ins in performance.
These aren’t the only tools you can use. This is one example, but there are so many options in the system you have. It’s a powerful system. You’ve spent a lot of money on it — think about the best way to leverage it.
Teresa Nelson
We get this a lot in implementations where clients say, “We’ve made a purchase — what do we actually have that we can implement now?” And the answer is pretty exciting. When you purchase just your core functionality, a number of modules come along with that. We’ve listed some of them out here, and these are places we can start looking right away and talk about how your business operates. Are there pieces of these that we can pull into a process to make something easier?
We don’t want you to just think about succession and comp and those larger modules. Also think about the functions that are part of the core that you can use little pieces of.
Melissa Olson
So how do you get from here? We talked about the questions you ask each other, the business, and your partners — but do a process audit. When you know what process you want to update, you’re not going to take it from how you did it on paper and just replicate those exact steps in a system. Think about what the dream process looks like — the most efficient way. People think about this all the time: “If only the system would just do this instead of me having to do it.” Document that before you meet with your partner to work through what the project is going to look like.
Teresa Nelson
It’s going back to that idea of starting with the end in mind — visualizing with your team what they want their future state to look like, and coming at your project from that perspective rather than starting with a checklist.
Come out with a prioritized list of what you want these outcomes to actually be: what areas are the most painful, what processes are the most manual today? Come with that list, have that conversation, and let’s build the solution around that — rather than coming at it from “let’s put this module in next, followed by this one.”
We often see what we call the vending machine approach: here’s our budget, what can we implement for this timeline or this resource team? We can still do it that way — this is the time we have and the budget we have, so let’s look through all of the processes and figure out which ones could be part of that project. That’s what your engagement, your SOW, and your budget end up looking like.
It’s especially impactful when you have a very limited budget or timeline to look at it this way, because at that point you’re probably looking at a partial module anyway — so why not impact one particular business process end to end, rather than getting a piece of it and then trying to cobble other bits on later?
Melissa Olson
OK, so what do you do now?
Get that foundation built — and you don’t have to do that alone. It might just mean talking with a partner like RPI and working through what you need for skills and this foundation, because these are processes you want to automate in the future.
The two modules we almost always see are performance and comp. Performance goals and comp are usually either wrapped into phase one or done immediately after. Think about those if you haven’t done your GHR project yet, or if you’re in optimization — go in with that mindset and start thinking about how to optimize the GHR project to support those other process automations. Then, getting into what Teresa mentioned, the more complex processes are learning management and automating all of that learning.
The reason succession is always at the end is because it builds on all of those data elements. You can’t get there until you know the responsibilities of your positions and the skills your employees have, so you can start seeing who’s available and who needs a career path developed.
And incentive comp lives off to the side because it can be really complex and usually only serves a small group — the very complex incentive comp is generally around leaders or smaller teams. While it’s impactful to get that off a spreadsheet, it might not be the best bang for your buck because you’re not impacting the whole organization by automating that process.
Whereas performance and goals tend to impact everyone.
Teresa Nelson
Everybody, almost — exactly.
Melissa Olson
So what do we do from here? Here are some things you can take back to your team to start thinking about these phase two optimizations.
Teresa Nelson
I hope we’ve inspired you to reframe the way you come at project planning, especially these optimizations. Instead of just asking “what module do we want to do next,” let’s think about the business process — even the business process for a specific team — that’s going to be most impactful.
Investing in those foundational elements that Melissa talked about: there are components that others build off of, so prioritizing those first is going to help you have a more complete implementation as you move through the system.
Scope the problem, not the module. You may not use a whole module, and you don’t have to feel guilty about that. Maybe you use a couple of fields to support something else, and that’s OK. When you think about that investment, reframe it: the investment is in our business, not in the software — because that will organically happen when you start doing the exercises we’ve thought through here.
And data visibility — I’ll always keep coming back to that, whether for reporting or, mostly, for analytics. Leaders have no insight into patterns over 5 or 10 years. Everything’s cyclical — the economy, world health, politics. If you could look back at 2008 when there was a recession, and you think one may be coming, what did your organization look like and what decisions had to be made?
You couldn’t look at that data then, because we didn’t have systems ingesting that much data at that point. But today you can start building it, and in 3 to 5 years you’ll already be able to get a lot more insight. Leaders, you need to think about what you need in order to make those decisions for your organization.
Then go to your HR team and talk about what data you feel like you need, so they can start capturing it — because they don’t know if they don’t know the questions you need answered.
Melissa Olson
I hope, like Teresa said, that was inspiring and sends you back with a different mindset. We look forward to hearing your comments and questions. Reach out — come to our website and fill out an info form, or email me directly. My email address is on screen. I handle HCM, so if you have HCM questions, email me, and if you have questions for Teresa, I can pass those along.
We love to solve problems, so come at us with whatever processes you’re trying to automate and improve — we love doing that. Have a wonderful rest of your day, and thank you for joining us today.
