We were doing a large HCM implementation and decided to utilize one of the certified partners to lead the project. The team consisted of 8-10 full-time individuals who functioned as Project Managers, Implementation Specialists, Business Analysts and Testers. We were told we were getting the best consultants they had to tackle the project. What we ended up getting was a different story. The project manager was knowledgeable, but come to find out she had 5 other projects that she was also managing. This led to lack of communication and glaring holes in the project plan which ultimately was deemed a failure. Their goal was to get the product installed as quickly as possible(which they did). Their team did not spend any time working with our business units to determine their current business processes and how those would transfer over to the new software along with improving efficiencies. We trusted the "certified partner" tag which cost us a ton of time and money.
I thought evaluating a handful of cloud-based payroll vendors would be enough for my project. But it turns out to be a nightmare. I was shown a different software and provided a completely different HR software. The story begins when I hire a software development company to outsource the product. Although I never heard about the company, still I trusted it. Here I made a mistake. I had no idea about the prototype they showed me. But they made me understand its uses and why it is crucial. This way, they won my trust and I agreed to further software development. Within 2 months I had the software product with me. But I had to take developers' help a lot to run the software. Basically, I was given a different software than I was shown. It was my HR technology implementation horror story.
We currently have an HR database that houses all our employee information (documents, benefits, training, salary, etc). The company informed us that our version was outdated and we needed to upgrade. Once the new upgrade was installed, we logged in to find our custom fields were no longer available. This was years of work! Luckily, we called our company and they were able to reverse the changes and restore our information.
I once worked on a project implementing a newly designed HR technology platform that was supposed to reduce manual data entry and provide more accurate data to the HR team. Unfortunately, the platform was so buggy and unreliable that it required manual input and data verification to keep running. We experienced frequent crashes and slowdowns and had to spend hours manually entering and verifying data. In the end, the project was a huge waste of time and money, and the HR team was left with a system that was more trouble than it was worth.
I oversaw an HRIS implementation that had multiple issues with the project. The first one was that the technology platform we had chosen was not designed to handle the kind of integration and data we needed to make the system work. We had to make lots of modifications to adjust to our environment to make the core platform work. Another issue was that some of the stakeholders had different ideas of what the final product should look like and kept changing their expectations. This led to a lot of back-and-forth, and re-work with everyone trying to agree on a final product. The project ended up taking twice as long as expected, and the results weren't as great as we had hoped. We had to re-do a lot of the work, burn cycles with our implementation partner, and stretch the team because of the constant changes in expectations. The end product wasn't as comprehensive or efficient as we had wanted. It worked and was adopted, but it was a costly and difficult lesson to learn.
One of my most harrowing HR experiences involved a company that used a proprietary HR software application that was extremely difficult to use and had a lot of glitches. It was also quite buggy, causing a lot of problems for employees. Fortunately, I was able to get the software fixed by upgrading it to a more standard application and then using that to manage employee records.
At some time in their professional lives, everyone has heard a horror story of employee information being lost, security being compromised, or other unanticipated repercussions that may be attributed to ineffective procedures or human mistakes. HR software makes it much easier for you to comply with laws like the GDPR and other industry rules you may have. It also enables much more effective and secure data management. Additionally, there is no need for concern while transferring data to a new system. Any HR software partner who is worth their salt will offer advice on how to achieve this and will not only know exactly what to do to safeguard your systems and information, but they'll also probably be familiar with any current technology you might have.
Remote work and construction work can never go hand-in-hand. Last year during the early post-pandemic stage, our company decided to keep the offices closed till the situation becomes clearer and continue working online. Since we were taking a lot of calls from clients for customized unmanned drones, I needed to spend almost 6+ hours every day on Zoom & MS Teams. And I didn’t know that the construction work going on in my house would create a huge noise mess in my remote work. There were some days when I had to plan my calls as per the drilling work schedule in our walls. On some days, the noise would be so loud that we had to call off the meeting which affected our sales process and neglected clients away from us.???? Remote work can only be productively completed when there is no noise in the room. (At least for me, it works like this!) So whenever you’re planning to even make minor adjustments in your home, match with your work calendar first to avoid any overlap of both.