Hosting 4 Rent Blog

Contents

Introduction
a) The scheme Manager
b) The scheme Team
c) The scheme Plan
d) scheme Plan Elements:

Hosting Choose Rent

1) Cleanse Data
2) generate Test Environment for Application
3) worker Numbers
4) Configure Organisational buildings
5) Configure Posts (Jobs)
6) Configuring Shift Patterns
7) Configure worker Details
8) Configure Users' way safety
9) Configure Hr and Pay Rules
10) Configure Reports
11) Configure Triggers
12) History Carried send
13) Populating the New Application
14) Parallel Running
15) Migrate Test Data onto Live Evironment
16) Old Data
16) De-commissioning

The Project

Introduction
This is a rather more detailed look at the Hris implementation. This has been done with the intention of giving a sense of scope and scale to the professional contemplating the acquisition and implementation of a new or exchange Hris, and is not exhaustive, nor constitutes the extreme scheme Plan.

Most of this record deals with Hr and Payroll applications, but a lot of the actions are generic to Time & Attendance systems. We shall modernize and improve this record from time to time to build on our visitors' knowledge base.

Your superior seller will have a wealth of feel in the supervision of Projects such as yours, but it is beneficial for you to have your own appreciation of what is involved.

A lot of this material is based on real-life feel (or scar tissue!) acquired by our Team over the policy of years, and we mean it to be presented in understandable language and easily-followed format.

a) The scheme Manager
If there's one message to get across here it's Do get your own scheme Manager; do Not rely on the seller to scheme manage on your behalf as they will ultimately fail to meet everyone's expectations, no matter how hard they work. They will always have difficulty balancing priorities that will occasionally be in conflict. You wouldn't expect a lawyer to act as both prosecutor and defender at the same time!

Importantly, having your own someone will give more ownership, and that the introduction of your new Hris isn't just something remote "happening to" your organisation

Let's get this in context right away:

i) the scheme manager is unlikely to be able to consolidate the Pm role with another day job.
ii) The scheme manager must have feel in interpreting the Vendor's plan, marshalling (and cajoling) resources, meeting deadlines and liaising with the Vendor. It's not a job for the amateur.

It's very tempting for, say, an Hr manager to assume the role, but it is inadvisable unless they have the above-mentioned experience. of course - trust me on this one.

Ideally, you should use someone with the relevant feel from elsewhere within the organisation who can look at the photo dispassionately and impartially. Doing it this way, the feel stays in the organisation. Failing this, hire a professional scheme Manager; it won't be cheap, but having committed yourself to the clarification you are not enhancing your chances of success by skimping on the essentials.

An option to reduce external costs can be to appoint a Programme manager to oversee your scheme manager if their uncut feel is not comprehensive. The Programme manager brief will involve taking a broad view of the project, and report - probably on a weekly basis - with the scheme Manager. In this way, the contractor expenditure is minimised, and the Programme manager can supply a mentoring role.

Whoever lands the scheme manager position Must have discretion to take decisions (within budget and other agreed limits) and have priority way to resources when required with causing unnecessary interruption to general activities. It is essential that all affected departments are consulted during the planning of the scheme on all matters that sway their habitancy and resources.

b) The scheme Team
Keep the team small. Only habitancy who have direct sway on the scheme should be in the core team. Others can be co-opted for various stages of the Plan that report to them.

A good estimate for the core team is 3. Beyond that, you have a committee, which will make consensus difficult and may slow matters when team members are unable to make the meetings. The more members, the more unlikely you can get everyone together on a quarterly basis.

c) The scheme Plan
It is usual for the seller to draw up a scheme plan detailing the actions required to load, configure, implement and test the application up to purchaser acceptance and sign-off.

As the client, you will need to draw up a shadow plan to meet the case that will include all the steps to be taken from your side, the persons responsible for resourcing those steps and the timelines for those steps to accord with the seller plan.

If you do not have the (expensive) scheme planning software tools for this, you can draw up your chart in Gantt format using Ms Excel.

d) scheme Plan elements
Below is an illustration of some typical actions in the client plan that sass to a required action in the specialist plan.

1. Cleanse data
Either circulate a blank form and ask employees to perfect it, or print out what you have on them and ask them to literal, or add information. I of course favour the old course, as it starts the data up from a zero base and means the employees have to make the exertion to get it right.

2. generate Test Environment for Application
This will be your It /Ict division that sets this up, generally by allocating a server and loading a copy of the application on to it, ready for data entry. At a later point, they will set up a Live Environment which will be the permanent home for your application.

3. worker Numbers
Ensure that the new application can carry the sequences that you use. If you have a historical set of worker numbers, it can be a good occasion to start from scratch

4. Configure Organisational Structure
My recommended action here is to replicate the organisation buildings on the basis of the Chart of Accounts used by the Finance Department. Not only does it make the reporting understandable across the organisation, but it facilitates the smooth export of data to other applications.

Departments can be configured to carry an alpha record and the numeric Chart estimate as well.

Example:

And so on...

Tip No 4.1

When setting up the structure, remember to have the organisation itself at the top of the "pyramid" otherwise you will not be able to transit habitancy between departments.

5. Configure Posts (Jobs)
A Post (Job) can be considered as the empty "suit" for a job that exists before whatever of course fills the job.

Attached to the Post will be a range of conditions:

Hours:
If thorough organisational hours are 40 per week, and the Post in question, e.g. Payroll Manager, is a 40 hpw job, then it will be considered to be 1 Fte (Full-Time Equivalent) If the Post was only 30 hours per week, then it would be expressed on a headcount record as 0.75 Fte.

Grade:
Most posts will be allocated within an agreed grade. inevitable benefits or conditions may automatically accrue from grades, and will need to be added to the Post accordingly.

Reports to:
This will be the immediate record in the organisational hierarchy. This has supplementary significance when Triggered Actions are set up, to ensure, for instance, that all employees reporting to a inevitable manager are advised of impending estimate meetings or Training Events.

The issue is a small clouded when an worker in fact holds two Posts - both maybe part-time - and reports to more than one Manager. Some software applications cannot handle this without having two different accounts set up for the person, which is extremely unsatisfactory, especially when it then impacts on the Payroll. If you have what are known as Multi-Posts in your organisation, you will have to look very considered at your seller specification. As a rough guide, most vendors who sell into the collective Sector will have this feature, by necessity.

Benefits:
Either dependent upon grade or maybe as a thorough feature of employment, benefits may be attached to Jobs. Theses can include Life Assurance, Permanent health insurance (Salary Continuation), Holidays and other Contractual provisions.

Property:
Some positions automatically require corporate property, such as mobile Telephones, Laptops and firm Cars.

6. Configuring Shift Patterns
Most organisations will have differing shift patterns for their employees, and can range from weekly straight through to rotations that repeat every 12 weeks or more. Check that you have every available current shift pattern defined, and then configure them on the T&A system. After this, you will tie each worker to a shift.

Some workers are defined as "floaters" as they have no fixed patter, but you can establish a no-shift category, and the Shift Supervisors can manually add them to shifts as required.

Good potential T&A systems make setting up and editing shifts very easy indeed. A supplementary refinement on some applications is diagnosis of exact work activities within shifts.

Tip No. 6.1

Sourcing a new Time & Attendance theory is the right time to re-evaluate your clock-in points. The clocks laid out an speculation of nearby consolidate of thousand pounds each, and so you of course don't want too many of them. Study the dynamics of your operation; are your clocking points too far away from the actual work stations?

7. Configure worker Details
Apart from disposition worker data such as Name and Address, there may be a requirement to add organisation-specific fields, or to configure existing fields.

In the old group could be Fire Officers, First Aiders or Appointed Persons; in the latter will be the organisation's required fields for categories such as Equal occasion Monitoring.

8. Configure Users' way Security
Defines who can way the application/s and to what level of data or action that they have access.

Access policies differ from organisation to organisation, but one rule should be constant: employees must not be able to turn their own records (except allowed fields in Self assistance environments) although they should be able to see them (Read Only) and have them included in reporting.

You may wish to allow the Training division to see worker records relating to Job and Training History, without having way to personal and wage data or in-house Recruiters to see Job detail only.

With Time & Attendance, the most coarse safety set-up is to allow Shift Supervisors to edit their own shift workers' absence records. Non attendance is edited in arrears when the cause for absence is known, and can then be shown as Unpaid, Sickness, compassionate or made up later on the shift, etc.

Access issues will also arise in Time & Attendance, where the theory is used for way operate to a building or parts of a building as well as a Time Recording device.

Self assistance presents a much more involved task, as you will need to organise safety levels for the majority of your workforce (those who have easy way to online access). This will involve setting parameters for the fields that can be changed by all employees (address, bank details, absence and holidays), their managers and supervisors (approvals and training recommendations) and senior supervision (e.g. Headcount, budgets and corporate communications).

9. Configure Hr and Pay Rules
There are two sets of Rules: Statutory and those set by the organisation.

Statutory rules are set by Government and thorough across every organisation. These will include categories such as Statutory Maternity Pay, Statutory Sick Pay, Minimum Wage and Basic Holidays.

Organisational rules are particular to that organisation and may sway Occupational provisions such as Sick Pay, Long assistance Entitlements, Pay Grades and Organisational hierarchy.

As with Data Cleansing, it is never too early too early to start collecting these rules together and tabulate them. Be sure to feel the seller for a matrix of rules that will be required so that you have a guide. Running round finding for data of this type while the vendor's consultant has the meter running is a wasteful way to work!

10. Configure Reports
You will have to think about the collection of reports to which you will need way from the outset, what fields should appear, how they are to be filtered and if there are any time or departmental parameters. These can be used in the record writing Training sessions, as there is no substitute in studying as doing these things for yourself!

Some examples of the most generally used reports are:

Headcount:

Employee Number, worker Name, Cost Centre, Full-Time Equivalent

Salaries:

Employee Number, worker Name, Cost Centre, yearly Salary

Long Service:

Employee Number, worker Name, Date Joined, Years' assistance (run from date of report)

Employee Turnover:

No. Of employees (within given period) x 100 divided by average estimate of Employees

Stability (example shown for yearly figure)

No. Of employees with 1 year's assistance x 100 divided by estimate of Employees employed 1 year ago.

Some reports use the same building blocks and only needed to be modified, maybe for data between two dates. You can set up two blank dates in your record (start and finish), so that when you run the record you can insert the required dates at that time. This is known in some reporting suites as Runtime Prompt.

11. Configure Triggers
Set out on paper a list of the actions of which you want notification, what triggers them, to whom notifications should be sent, and when.

For example, all new employees are on a 12 week probation period, and you want to ensure that the probation interview is carried out in a timely fashion. You configure the trigger by ensuring that the Probation rule for this worker is 3 months. You can then set the trigger to send a formatted and mail merged email reminder to the Line Manager, the worker (and Hr department, if necessary) at start date + 10 weeks.

Example:

Trigger: New worker
Field: Probation
Condition: Start Date + 12 weeks - 2 weeks (or +10 weeks)
Action: Email
Message: "Please note that (employee name) is due for Probation report on Date (derived from the Start Date + 12 weeks). Please ensure that this report is completed by the due date."

This is simplistic, but gives an indication of how these Triggers are constructed.

12. History Carried Forward
Payroll history is easy to manage, as only the current tax year is held live and old data is held as an archive. These must be accessible for not less than seven years by statute, so you will need to have arrangements in place for this to comply (see Old Data).

Time and Attendance records, too, are not commonly carried send from old holiday years. It is advisable to retain a cheap estimate of this data, maybe 3 years, as it may be relevant to inherent disciplinary action, or litigation in respect of Sickness Absence and industrial injury.

Hr records are rather more difficult to settle upon. It's probably fair to say that the longer an worker is with an organisation, the thinner the file! The tendency is to collect more and more data about newer employees, and the trend is escalating.

Factors that should sway the estimate of worker history will include:

How often do you of course refer to records more than a year old?
Does whatever ever look back at vocation progression over the past 10 years?
Just how literal, - and detailed - is the history?
The more history you bring forward, the more precious it becomes. Every historical post going back in time must be created, populated, and then depopulated as the worker moves on, even though the jobs, and occasionally departments, may have passed out of living memory. You are in fact reconstructing the past, and, as previously mentioned, this history may be inaccurate sufficient as to be of dubious worth.

An efficient way of resolving this would be to agree a point in time, say 2/3 years old to the current migration time, and import this into the new application. Earlier data can then be retained in a form of History file (see Old Data Item 15)

13. Populating the new application
Many applications are populated by uploading a series of associated spreadsheets (usually.csv derived from Excel) by way of a data importer.

You can aid this process by requesting the spreadsheet templates from the vendor, and populate them from your newly-cleansed data sources. Although this is time-consuming, it is a very good sense check on the data that you have, and gives you at least a bit more rights and operate over it; you will find at times during a scheme that there are times that it seems like something happening elsewhere!

14. Parallel Running
It goes without saying that the most "mission critical" application is the Payroll. Either you are enchanting from one application to another, or to your first computerised Hris you will need to parallel run - that is, run it alongside your current arrangement, for a period, mainly for testing purposes to collate and validate production as well as to witness any running problems before going live.

Payroll and, to a lesser extent, Time & Attendance run more in "real time" than Hr, and therefore should be prioritised.

One of the most frequent questions we are asked is "how many parallel runs should we do?" There is no hard and fast answer, and it will all depend on your resources, but we would propose a minimum of two, and probably no more than three. If you are still encountering essential discrepancies after two parallel runs, you must fast establish where the faults lie and literal, them, otherwise your scheme will come unstuck.

When the parallel running and other testing is completed satisfactorily, the purchaser will then sign off an End User Testing Acceptance document. The data is then ready to be loaded in to the Live Environment.

15. Migrate Test Data onto Live Environment
This will be carried out by the It/Ict function, and will involve decanting the validated data into the live application Environment, ready for live use.

On web-hosted applications, this will be done by the host on their own location, and the purchaser merely points their browser to the new live address.

16. Old Data
Often overlooked. As well as establishing how much history you bring send into the new application, you still have a decision to make on where to store historical data.

Payroll is required to be accessible for no less than seven years, and Hr is an ongoing record. The main options are:

Maintaining an environment version of the old application, where records can be accessed and read;
Data converted into a modern format such as Excel where it can be used at will;
The old-fashioned giant pile of printout.

The first two have a cost attached; a) is commonly an ongoing rental charge and b) is a one-time charge. Neither is particularly cheap. The last option is not as impractical as it might sound; habitancy generally overestimate the estimate of way they need to historical data. Providing the history reports are produced in a range of sorts (Surname, worker Number, National insurance Number, Operating Division) then look-ups are not time-consuming.

17. De-commissioning
Remember if you are phasing out a old application then you will need to study the terms under which you give it up, with special regard to consideration periods and financial considerations attached to them.

Existing systems should be maintained until perfect cut-over to the new application is complete, and then they can be cleared down and withdrawn from the operating platform. Ensure that all specialist disks are accounted for are returned to the primary vendor, or disposed of in line with their wishes.

The Hris Implementation scheme