Introduction Network Operating Systems Project

CONTENTS

Introduction

a) The Project Manager

b) The Project Team

c) The Project Plan

d) Project Plan Elements:

1) Cleanse Data

2) Create Test Environment for Application

3) Employee Numbers

4) Configure Organisational Structure

5) Configure Posts (Jobs)

6) Configuring Shift Patterns

7) Configure Employee Details

Configure Users’ Access Security

9) Configure HR and Pay Rules

10) Configure Reports

11) Configure Triggers

12) History Carried Forward

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 elaborate look at the HRIS implementation. This has been done with the aim of giving a sense of scope and scale to the professional contemplating the acquisition and implementation of a new or alternate HRIS, and is not exhaustive, nor constitutes the extreme Project Plan.

Most of this article deals with HR and Payroll applications, but a lot of the activenesses are generic to Time & Attendance systems. We shall update and exaggerate this article from time to time to build on our visitors’ cognition base.

Your chosen Vendor will have a wealth of experience in the management of Projects such as yours, but it is utile for you to have your own appreciation of what is involved.

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

a) The Project Manager

If there’s one message to get all over here it’s DO get your own Project Manager; do NOT rely on the Vendor to project manage on your behalf as they will at last fail to meet everyone’s expectations, no matter how hard they work. They will always have difficultness balancing priorities that will now and then be in conflict. You wouldn’t suppose a lawyer to act as both prosecutor and defender at the same time!

Importantly, having your own person 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 Project Manager is improbable to be capable to combine the PM role with another day job.

ii) The Project Manager must have experience in interpreting the Vendor’s plan, marshalling (and cajoling) resources, meeting deadlines and liaising with the Vendor. It’s not a occupation 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. Really – trust me on this one.

Ideally, you will have to use someone with the applicable experience from elsewhere within the organisation who may look at the picture dispassionately and impartially. Doing it this way, the experience stays in the organisation. Failing this, hire a professional Project Manager; it won’t be cheap, but having consecrated yourself to the solution you are not bettering your probabilities of success by skimping on the essentials.

An option to reduce external costs may be to appoint a Programme Manager to oversee your Project Manager if their overall experience is not comprehensive. The Programme Manager brief will implicate taking a wide view of the project, and review – in all likelihood on a on a weekly basis basis – with the Project Manager. In this way, the contractor expenditure is minimised, and the Programme Manager may provide a mentoring role.

Whoever lands the Project Manager position MUST have discretion to take conclusions (within budget and other consorted limits) and have priority access to resources when required with causing unnecessary disruption to normal activities. It is necessary that all affected departments are consulted for the duration of the planning of the project on all matters that affect their humans and resources.

b) The Project Team

Keep the team small. Only humans who have direct influence on the Project must be in the core team. Others may be co-opted for respective stages of the Plan that relate to them.

A good number 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 improbable you may get every one together on a regular basis.

c) The Project Plan

It is popular for the Vendor to draw up a project plan detailing the activenesses required to load, configure, employ 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 comprise all the steps to be taken from your side, the people responsible for resourcing those steps and the timelines for those steps to accord with the Vendor plan.

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

d) Project Plan elements

Below is an illustration of a heap of typical activenesses in the client plan that respond to a required action in the master plan.

1. Cleanse data

Either circulate a blank form and ask workers to finish it, or print out what you have on them and ask them to rectify or add information. I genuinely favour the former course, as it starts the selective information up from a zero base and means the workers have to make the venture to get it right.

2. Create Test Environment for Application

This will be your IT /ICT section that sets this up, in general 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. Employee Numbers

Ensure that the new application may carry the sequences that you use. If you have a historical set of employee numbers, it may be a good probability to commence from scratch

4. Configure Organisational Structure

My commended action here is to replicate the organisation structure on the basis of the Chart of Accounts employed by the Finance Department. Not only does it make the reporting understandable all over the organisation, but it facilitates the smooth export of data to other applications.

Departments may be set up to carry an alpha description and the numeric Chart number as well.

Example:

And so on…

Tip No 4.1

When setting up the structure, do not forget to have the organisation itself at the top of the “pyramid” other than as supposed or expected you will not be competent to transit persons amid departments.

5. Configure Posts (Jobs)

A Post (Job) may be considered as the empty “suit” for a occupation that exists before anybody actually fills the job.

Attached to the Post will be a range of conditions:

Hours:

If usual 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 indicated on a headcount report as 0.75 FTE.

Grade:

Most posts will be allocated within an accorded grade. Certain gains or conditions may mechanically accrue from grades, and will need to be added to the Post accordingly.

Reports to:

This will be the prompt report in the organisational hierarchy. This has further and added importance when Triggered Actions are set up, to ensure, for instance, that all laborers reporting to a sure manager are advised of approaching Appraisal meetings or Training Events.

The issue is a little beclouded when an employee in fact holds two Posts – both perchance part-time – and reports to more than one Manager. Some software apps can not handle this without having two dissimilar accounts set up for the person, which is highly unsatisfactory, in particular 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 conservatively at your vender specification. As a rough guide, most vendors who trade into the Public Sector will have this feature, by necessity.

Benefits:

Either dependent upon grade or perchance as a usual feature of employment, gains may be attached to Jobs. Theses may include Life Assurance, Permanent Health Insurance (Salary Continuation), Holidays and other Contractual provisions.

Property:

Some positions mechanically require corporate property, such as Mobile Telephones, Laptops and Company Cars.

6. Configuring Shift Patterns

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

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

Good quality T&A schemes make setting up and editing shifts very easy indeed. A further refinement on a great deal of apps is analysis of specific work activenesses within shifts.

Tip No. 6.1

Sourcing a new Time & Attendance scheme is the right time to re-evaluate your clock-in points. The clocks represent an investment of around couple of thousand pounds each, and so you actually don’t want too a heap of of them. Study the dynamics of your operation; are your clocking points too far away from the actual work stations?

7. Configure Employee Details

Apart from routine employee selective information such as Name and Address, there may be a requisite to add organisation-specific fields, or to configure existent fields.

In the former 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 Opportunity Monitoring.

8. Configure Users’ Access Security

Defines who may access the application/s and to what level of selective information or action that they have access.

Access policies differ from organisation to organisation, but one rule ought to be constant: workers ought to not be capable to change their own records (except permitted fields in Self Service environments) though they will have to be competent to see them (Read Only) and have them included in reporting.

You may wish to grant the Training division to see employee records relating to Job and Training History, without having access to personal and salary info or in-house Recruiters to see Job detail only.

With Time & Attendance, the most mutual security set-up is to concede Shift Supervisors to edit their own shift workers’ absence records. Non attendance is edited in arrears when the cause for absence is known, and may then be shown as Unpaid, Sickness, Compassionate or made up later on the shift, etc.

Access issues will likewise arise in Time & Attendance, where the system is applied for Access Control to a building or elements of a building as well as a Time Recording device.

Self Service presents a much more complex task, as you will need to organise security levels for the majority of your workforce (those who have easy access to online access). This will implicate setting parameters for the fields that may be changed by all workers (address, bank details, absence and holidays), their managing directors and supervisors (approvals and training recommendations) and senior management (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 frequent throughout each organisation. These will include categories such as Statutory Maternity Pay, Statutory Sick Pay, Minimum Wage and Basic Holidays.

Organisational rules are peculiar to that organisation and may affect Occupational provisions such as Sick Pay, Long Service Entitlements, Pay Grades and Organisational hierarchy.

As with Data Cleansing, it is never too early too early to commence gathering these rules together and tabulate them. Be sure to contact the vendor for a matrix of rules that will be required so that you have a guide. Running round looking for info of this type while the vendor’s advisor has the meter running is a wasteful way to work!

10. Configure Reports

You will have to think with regards to the assortment of reports to which you will need access from the outset, what fields will have to appear, how they are to be filtered and if there are any time or departmental parameters. These may be applied in the Report writing Training sessions, as there is no alternate in learning as doing these things for yourself!

Some examples of the most normally used reports are:

Headcount:

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

Salaries:

Employee Number, Employee Name, Cost Centre, Annual Salary

Long Service:

Employee Number, Employee Name, Date Joined, Years’ Service (run from date of report)

Employee Turnover:

No. of workers (within given period) x 100 divided by Average Number of Employees

Stability (example shown for annual figure)

No. of laborers with 1 year’s service x 100 disunited by Number of Employees applied 1 year ago.

Some reports use the same building blocks and only necessitated to be modified, perchance for info among two dates. You may set up two blank dates in your report (start and finish), so that when you run the report you may insert the required dates at that time. This is known in a good deal of 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 will have to be sent, and when.

For example, all new workers are on a 12 week probation period, and you want to assure that the probation consultation is carried out in a timely fashion. You configure the trigger by ensuring that the Probation rule for this employee is 3 months. You may then set the trigger to forward a formatted and mail unified email reminder to the Line Manager, the employee (and HR department, if necessary) at get started date + 10 weeks.

Example:

Trigger: New Employee

Field: Probation

Condition: Start Date + 12 weeks – 2 weeks (or +10 weeks)

Action: Email

Message: “Please note that (employee name) is due for Probation review on Date (derived from the Start Date + 12 weeks). Please make sure that this review is finished 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 former data is held as an archive. These will have to 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 ordinarily carried forward from former holiday years. It is advisable to retain a reasonable amount of this data, perhaps 3 years, as it may be applicable to possible disciplinal action, or litigation in respect of Sickness Absence and Industrial injury.

HR records are rather more difficult to determine upon. It’s in all likelihood reasonable to say that the longer an employee is with an organisation, the thinner the file! The tendency is to gather more and more info in regards to newer employees, and the trend is escalating.

Factors that ought to affect the amount of employee history will include:

How often times do you actually refer to records more than a year old?

Does anybody ever look back at career progress over the past 10 years?

Just how exact – and elaborate – is the history?

The more history you fetch forward, the more costly it becomes. Every historical post going back in time must be created, populated, and then depopulated as the employee moves on, even altho the jobs, and once in a while departments, may have passed out of living memory. You are in fact reconstructing the past, and, as antecedently mentioned, this history may be inaccurate sufficient as to be of dubious worth.

An effective way of settling this would be to agree a point in time, say 2/3 years former to the current migration time, and import this into the new application. Earlier selective information may then be held in a form of History file (see Old Data Item 15)

13. Populating the new application

Many apps are populated by uploading a series of related spreadsheets (usually.csv derived from Excel) by way of a data importer.

You may support this routine by requesting the spreadsheet templates from the vendor, and populate them from your newly-cleansed selective information sources. Although this is time-consuming, it is a very good sense check on the selective information that you have, and gives you at least a bit more ownership and control over it; you will find at times for the duration of a project 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. Whether you are moving from one application to another, or to your introductory computerised HRIS you will need to parallel run – that is, run it alongside your current arrangement, for a period, mainly for testing purposes to compare and validate output as well as to discover any running difficultnesses before going live.

Payroll and, to a lesser extent, Time & Attendance run more in “real time” than HR, and hence ought to be prioritised.

One of the most usual questions we are asked is “how a good deal of parallel runs will have to we do?” There is no hard and fast answer, and it will all depend on your resources, but we would commend a minimum of two, and probably no more than three. If you are still encountering significant discrepancies after two parallel runs, you must speedily establish where the faults lie and rectify them, other than as supposed or expected your project will come unstuck.

When the parallel running and other testing is finished satisfactorily, the purchaser will then sign off an End User Testing Acceptance document. The selective information 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 implicate decanting the validated selective information 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 fetch forward 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 choices are:

Maintaining an environs version of the former application, where records may be accessed and read;

Data converted into a contemporary format such as Excel where it may be employed at will;

The old-fashioned giant pile of printout.

The initial 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; people in general overestimate the amount of access they need to historical data. Providing the history reports are formulated in a range of sorts (Surname, Employee Number, National Insurance Number, Operating Division) then look-ups are not time-consuming.

17. De-commissioning

Remember if you are phasing out a former application then you will need to study the terms underneath which you give it up, with particular regard to observe periods and financial considerations attached to them.

Existing schemes will have to be maintained until finish cut-over to the new application is complete, and then they may be cleared down and withdrawn from the operating platform. Ensure that all master disks are accounted for are returned to the firstborn vendor, or disposed of in line with their wishes.

Introduction Network Operating Systems Project

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Introduction Network Operating Systems Project Photo

Introduction Network Operating Systems Project Picture

Introduction Network Operating Systems Project Pic

Introduction Network Operating Systems Project Photo

Introduction Network Operating Systems Project Pic

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