Port Stephens Council's journey with HR technology has been a long and winding road. They started talking about implementing HR technology nine years ago and after finally getting approval to go ahead in 2013, they began their implementation journey. Michelle Gilliver-Smith, Organisation Development Manager at Port Stephens Council will be sharing this fascinating case study at HR Tech Fest 27-29 November 2016 in Melbourne. She gives us a sneak peek into her session and shares seven lessons learnt from their HR technology journey.

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When we started our HR technology project back in 2013 we had a lot of issues around our existing HRIS. It didn't really deliver what we needed. It was okay at paying people and keeping statistics on their leave patterns but we really struggled to get data out of the system. We had a whole heap of manual data capturing systems that were just workarounds to get the data the organisation needed.

So we started on our journey of HR transformation, following the well-trodden path of scoping our problems, going to market, getting vendors to demonstrate their products and eventually selecting our software and implementation partners. We finally implemented our HR technology which, 18 months down the track, is working brilliantly.

But it wasn't all smooth sailing. Although we'd been preparing for our HR technology implementation for a long time, there were some things we just didn't see coming. Along the way we learnt some valuable lessons which I'll share with you here.

1. Don't Assume You Have the Answer to Your HR Tech Problems at the Start

When we started on this journey we truly believed there was going to be one beautiful HRIS solution out there for us that would fix all our problems. We didn't believe that we could improve on our current system or that we could develop a best-of-breed approach that would fix our issues in an integrated way.

Our senior leadership team had initially wanted us to only use the corporate system. Thankfully we use the business excellence framework here at Port Stephens Council which means we can't make any decisions or assumptions until we have enough data. So this forced us to keep our eyes open to the possibility of doing something completely different.

I started to talk to our senior leadership team and asking them why they thought they needed one system. I remember having a conversation with our Financial Services Manager who was very adamant about having one system and asking him “What exactly is the issue for you?â€' It came to light that all they really were talking about was having one system for entering financial transactions, and not duplicating systems. Once I understood that's what their true concerns were, I got agreement from them that if I could find a system that would integrate with our corporate system without duplicating data and it still delivers those end-to-end financial transactions that they needed, they would support it.

2. Proving ROI Is the Fastest Route to Approval

Our HR Tech journey at Port Stephens Council has been a long and winding road. The HR team started talking about needing this new system nine years before we actually got it. That's not a typo – nine years! We had several attempts at it and hadn't been successful simply because we couldn't get the argument across the line. And it was really because we didn't provide enough data to convince the senior management team that this was something worth looking at.

So we started looking at what we were currently doing and what a new HR tech solution would save us – how much was it costing us to have people manually entering data rather than admin people doing it? What effect was capturing paper records and filing them having on our productivity? What would we save if we automated these tasks? And if people were clear on our strategic plans, and we were able to measure their delivery of that plan, how would that positively impact the organisation?

Once we could show that data we got some credibility, instead of us just saying, “It doesn't work and we need something better.â€'

3. Build Your HR Tech Army

Although you may be appointed to lead your HR technology project, you don't have to do this alone. Having the right people on your team can be the difference between a successful implementation and one that needs constant back tracking to fix problems.

I think it's really important that you have subject matter specialists on your team. For example, we had to cleanse a fair bit of data in the learning and development space before we transferred it into the new system. I know many organisations just let an IT person do that but I think that's a big mistake because often they don't know what they're looking at. We actually had our subject matter specialist do the data cleansing under some instruction from IT specialists, both internal and external to the organisation. What that meant was is that data transferred across perfectly with no issues at all.

We also had a business analyst on the team who really helped with crunching a lot of the early data and liaising between the various vendors and the project team. We had some ICT specialists and some senior managers as well, just to make sure that what we were delivering was really in line with what the organisation needed.

4. Be Crystal Clear on Expectations With HR Tech Partners

I think you have to be very clear right from the outset what it is you're looking for and what you expect from HR Tech partners. Sometimes that requires you to have very authentic and even blunt conversations about what you want to see from them. After being promised many things by our previous HR tech vendor that hadn't been delivered in the past, we decided to approach the vendors' product demos a little differently. Instead of just getting them in and saying, “Show us what this system can do,â€' we actually provided them with a list of scenarios of things that were real pain points for us. We gave them some time before they had to present, but we said to them very clearly, “That's what we want you to show us. We do not want you to just come in and do your sales pitch. We want you to show us exactly how your system does these things.â€'

5. Make Regular Meetings With Your HR Tech Partners (And Commit to Them)

Every week we had a meeting via webinar with our implementation partners. Initially we were concerned that we weren't going to have a lot of face-to-face time so we made it really clear that that was a concern for us. I can absolutely say that it did work, but only because both parties were religious in committing to those meetings and having meaningful conversations. It was only an hour a week, it wasn't onerous, but we were able to work through any issues that we had at that point every week.

6. Take the Free Wins Along the Way

Because we had such detailed conversations about our HR processes and technology throughout this whole process, our HR tech partners helped us find some improvements we could make to our corporate system which would address some of the pain points that we had around payroll and reporting. So that was very helpful and something we didn't expect to come out of this process. But the best part was we discovered that we had the talent in-house to make those improvements because we had the right people on the project team who were able to say, “You know what? That's pretty simple and I can fix that,â€' or someone in their team could fix it. So that was a nice surprise!

7. Give Your HR Tech Project the Time & Resources It Deserves

In the end we had a remarkably smooth implementation. I think one of the reasons was that for the first time as an organisation we said, “We need these people to work on this project and we need to free up enough time in their work programs to allow them to do that.â€' And that's what we did. Instead of telling people to do this on top of everything else they do, we made sure we had the resources we needed to make this HR Tech project a success.

Hear more about Port Stephens HRIS transformation at HR Tech Fest 27-29 November 2016 in Melbourne, a two-day celebration of the talent, technology, ideas and innovations that are transforming the future of work. 

About the Author

Michelle Gilliver-Smith is Organisation Development Manager at Port Stephens Council. She is responsible for the delivery of initiatives that drive sustainable, transformational change at the council.