The fifth blog post in this series explains some of the challenges that are often not factored in, and how anticipating them early on will lead to smoother and more successful adoption of HR Service Management.
Anticipate challenges in advance
Perhaps the greatest challenge you are likely to encounter is resistance to change. Although the objective is to improve service, you will be introducing new ways of working and initiating change, which takes people out of their comfort zones. Existing processes, however manual or ineffective, are familiar and people will quickly revert to the old ways of doing things. Teams have established processes and generally don’t appreciate others disrupting the status quo and interfering with the way they work. Accept this early on and define a strategy to tackle it head-on. Involving representatives from different teams in the planning stages allows you to quickly identify product champions, who can smooth the transition, reduce resistance and encourage others to get on-board.
Communicating the purpose of the change and its objectives is a good starting point but you will also need to pay close attention to the benefits your employees and managers will get once it has been implemented. Explaining “What’s in it for me?” to your employees, managers, service delivery teams and executives will go a long way towards convincing people to get on-board.
You will have identified the budget and resources you will need to implement your new HR Service Management solution within your project brief. However, it’s easy to underestimate the budget and resources you will need to support on-going process development and continuous service improvement. These costs can be minimized by selecting the right HR Service Management tool. Although this blog post series does not cover the tool selection process, I strongly advise that you pay close attention to the skills and knowledge that will be required for on-going configuration, administration and maintenance.
Modern HR Service Management solutions provide simple drag and drop features for configuration, so that anyone can amend and improve processes without the need for technical gurus, whereas others need a small army of expensive developers to maintain them. Cloud-based tools offer additional cost benefits, as the vendor retains the responsibility of maintaining the tool, keeping it secure and ensuring that it remains up to date by deploying updates continuously. If your preferred vendor does not offer these options, you’ll need to factor additional costs into your budget to accommodate for on-going development, maintenance and upgrades.
The sixth blog post in this series discusses the important topics of defining your services, building your service catalog and request types, and how to leverage User Stories to ensure that your HR Service Management solution has the right functionality built-in to deliver the outcomes you need.If you’d rather not wait, download the Smart Guide now to help your organization - Deliver the HR Service Experience your employees deserve.
