How to choose your project owner support team for a successful HRIS implementation project

Throughout my various HRIS assignments, I’ve often heard the same comments from my customers: ” it’s not the need I expressed “, ” the tool doesn’t correspond to my needs ” or ” why did we make this decision in the first place?

My name is Lise-Marie TROUCHE and I’m an Project Owner Support Manager. I’ve been working for SQORUS for 7 years now. I began my missions in the project management teams, configuring the Oracle HCM Cloud solution. I was able to work on implementation projects with a multitude of international deployments, and also on run projects with a view to continuous improvement of HRIS processes.

In the course of my assignments, I realized that I spent a lot of time identifying and questioning my customers’ HR processes, and imagining how the tool could best meet this need.
There weren’t many offerings on the HRIS market in this area. Knowing the solution and having a thorough understanding of HR processes helped me greatly in my missions, and this is how I came to specialize in project owner support.

What is HRIS project management?

We often hear this term, but what does it mean in the context of an HRIS project? The project owner support team assists the project owner, i.e. the customer. The customer will need help to bring the project to a successful conclusion, and the project owner support team is there to make its expertise and skills available to provide all the elements the customer needs to make the right decisions. What does this mean in concrete terms? How will the project owner support team support the customer?

• Framing and monitoring the project: the project management team defines the scope of the project and the issues at stake. It identifies the various stakeholders, their roles and the resources required… It draws up the roadmap. It also ensures project governance, monitoring milestones and scope.

• Gathering and formalizing requirements: the project owner support team helps the customer and his functional (business) teams to define their needs, question HR processes and the way they are built, identify possible improvements, and move towards a target in line with the chosen HRIS solution. They write the functional specifications, validated with the customer’s business teams, and trace all the decisions made in relation to them.

• Team coordination: the project owner support team plays a key role in coordinating the various parties involved in the project. For example, it is the project owner support team that transmits business requirements to the implementation team (integrator – project management support), which is responsible for configuring the solution. It is also there to translate the functional requirements expected by the integrator into technical terms. In my opinion, this role of facilitator is one of the most underestimated missions of the project owner support team. It’s not enough to simply define the business needs, you also need to know the HRIS solution you’ve chosen, and understand the implementation methodology adopted by the integrator, to ensure that the project progresses as smoothly as possible and that the solution meets the stated requirements.

• Management of testing and acceptance phases: the project owner support team organizes and supervises the testing phase: planning, testing strategy, drafting of acceptance specifications and functional use cases, training of testers, acceptance management.
  The project owner support team checks that the parameters set up in the solution meet the business needs expressed.

• Preparation for opening up to users and the post-project period: this phase consists of defining the strategy for opening up to end users, often in conjunction with the change management team (training, communication strategy, stakeholder involvement, etc.). This phase also enables us to anticipate the post-project period and to think about the organization of the target maintenance system (RUN).

HRIS Project Management Consultant: dual expertise in business and tools

Within the SQORUS Oracle HCM Cloud community, we are convinced that the project management team supporting the customer in an HRIS implementation project must have dual expertise: functional (HR processes, etc.) and technical (knowledge of the tool).

You need to understand how the tool works, its capabilities and its data model, and you also need to understand the integrator’s expectations for parameterizing the tool.
This dual knowledge will enable us to meet the needs of each stakeholder and ensure that the project runs smoothly.

A solution such as Oracle HCM Cloud offers enormous scope for process parameterization and customization, but don’t forget that there’s a base to respect. It works with a predefined standard base. You can’t completely remake the solution, and that’s not the point. On the contrary, knowing the foundation of the solution and using it to optimize your processes will be the winning combination for a successful Oracle HCM Cloud project.

The benefits of an project owner support team with dual expertise

At SQORUS, we train our project owner support consultants in both functional and project management skills (process modeling, specification writing, recipe piloting and animation, project governance, understanding of post-project/run project issues, etc.) and technical skills (operation of the HRIS solution such as Oracle HCM Cloud, navigation, expected data model, tool capabilities, etc. ….).

Choosing an project owner support team with this dual expertise will enable the customer to :

• Save time in defining specifications by ensuring that business needs are effectively matched to the chosen solution

• Easier communication between the integrator and the business teams, thanks to the transmission of information that is clear and relevant to the integrator, and that takes into account business expectations and the integrator’s needs.

• An understanding of the impact of business decisions on the solution, enabling the customer to make informed decisions

• Mastery of the technical solutions proposed by the integrator, and assurance that the solutions meet business needs

• Sharing of market best practices, with recommendations on the use of the solution and process modeling

• Anticipating solution maintenance issues

Choosing SQORUS means choosing a company with expertise in implementing solutions such as Oracle HCM Cloud, and with the ability to advise on the best way to use the solution based on market best practices and customer feedback.