The third blog post in this series provided advice on getting feedback from employees and also highlighted the top challenges that recruiting managers face when dealing with HR. This fourth blog post describes some useful techniques that allow you to prioritize requirements and create a project brief that outlines what good looks like.
Highlight and prioritize the major challenges that must be addressed
Once you’ve established the challenges that need to be addressed, you’ll need to prioritize your requirements. The MoSCoW method is a useful tool for prioritizing requirements into Must have, Should have, Could have and Won’t have within the scope of this service improvement initiative. Describe these challenges at a high level, and in plain language, so that everyone involved has a clear understanding of the problems that need to be solved. Although not an exhaustive list, here are some of the challenges that are commonly mentioned:
- Long-winded recruitment process – It’s not uncommon to hear averages of 100 days or more from HR receiving a recruitment request to the employee start date
- Managers do not have the time to read and digest the numerous HR process and policy documents published on the Intranet. They need guidance that’s easy to access and a process that’s simple to follow
- Managers do not follow the recruitment process and/or do not provide all the information that HR needs to process a recruitment request, so the process gets delayed
- Too many manual processes and paper-based forms with free text fields, which managers struggle to complete correctly, and HR teams struggle to decipher, causing extra work and delays
- Service Delivery teams are using email to track requests and spreadsheets to record their workload. Requests often fall through the cracks and are not dealt with. HR staff waste time entering data and updating spreadsheets. The process is time-consuming, inconsistent and error prone. Data must be hand-cranked to produce service performance reports, and without meaningful metrics, it is difficult to determine how service can be improved.
Create a Project brief to outline what good looks like
A good project brief helps get everyone on the same page. It outlines the purpose of the project, its’ objectives, expectations and deliverables in advance, so that everyone involved has a clear understanding of what good looks like. It captures and defines the core objectives, scope, deliverables, budget and schedule. A well-crafted project brief ensures that individuals and teams are better informed, well-managed and can work together effectively to deliver the desired outcomes in scope, on time and within budget. Although the Project Brief must incorporate the goals and objectives for your organization, the generic example below offers a flavor of some of the elements that it might include.
Example Project Brief
The purpose of this project is to ensure customer-focused HR service delivery across the entire employee lifecycle, including reviews of all HR Administrative processes, working practices, policies and HR Service Delivery performance across all customer access channels. The project will prototype and implement changes to streamline business processes, improve end-to-end performance and establish meaningful metrics to support effective, cost-efficient HR service delivery and facilitate business improvement.
Example Objectives
Ideally you will base your improvements on SMART objectives if you already have, or can generate the data to baseline current performance. For example, if customer satisfaction is X, your objective will be to increase it to Y within Z months. Examples of some key objectives you may wish to include are:
- Improve customer satisfaction
- Reduce time to recruit
- Review, expand or consolidate customer access channels to HR Services
- Provide an engaging and consumer-like HR Service experience to employees
- Promote 24x7x365 Self-Service availability to minimize delays and reduce costs
- Improve quality and employees use of online information, knowledge and guidance
- Automate end-to-end processes and reduce delays by eliminating manual processes and hard copy forms
- Increase capacity in the team to meet demand by eliminating requests for status updates / progress
- Establish meaningful metrics, Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) and Service Level Agreements (SLA’s) to support better decisions and improve HR Service Delivery
- Promote greater collaboration between HR teams and with other departments
- Transform HR Service Delivery to support the organizations digital agenda
The next blog post in this series will examine some of the challenges you will undoubtedly face when introducing the changes that will be necessary to get HR Service Management established. If you’d rather not wait, download the Smart Guide now to help your organization - Deliver the HR Service Experience your employees deserve.
