Your HR system needs a product manager, not an administrator

The typical large enterprise spends $200 per employee annually on their HRIS - a multi-million dollar prospect for many of them. For smaller companies, the total sticker price is lower, but on a per employee basis it can be in the high hundreds to low thousands. In any case, HR systems represent a sizable investment for an organization.

Yet paradoxically we typically put little effort into launching, maintaining, and evolving these systems, and then we wonder why they tend to fizzle out and grow derelict. It feels similar to what happens with M&A, also notoriously low ROI. So much energy goes into the due diligence, negotiation, business case, and "selling it in" that - once completed - everyone wants to take a breather in celebration. Many of the involved parties move on to their next thing, as we shift into the slog that is "execution." Energy and attention fleets away. It becomes just another thing, until it's forgotten, like so many initiatives before it.

Is that the Ark of the Covenant... or yet another defunct HR system?

Why do we fall into this trap, time and time again? A few reasons:

• We continually de-prioritize things that are for "internal use" relative to those for "external use." While there's logic behind this - "clients first" and all that - it ignores some basic facts: a) our people are our biggest investment; b) we need our people to be productive to produce for clients; c) more effectively acquiring, developing, and managing talent (the point of HR systems) is fundamental to having productive people. Think about it... ALL of our people should be touching this system if used properly and to get max benefit from it; it's a key part of our virtual office. What's good for our internal efforts can have major benefits for our external productivity. Just because it's only internally visible doesn't mean it's trivial.
• We underestimate the effort required to make the system successful. We spend so much on off-the-shelf solutions that we expect them to "just work"; vendor puffery around their being a panacea help to sell in but don't help with reality. We discount the unique aspects of the needs, processes, and resources within our companies, and the work that's required to customize both functionality and support.
• We starve the budget for implementation and support so we can make the case more easily. Even when we're realistic about how much effort it will take to execute, we still discount this in the name of being able to afford the system itself. 10-20% can swing a business case one way or another. But shortchanging this to get the thumbs up is like buying a fixer-upper without being able to afford the renovations. You might be able to buy it, but then you have to live in it.
• We lack a single, named owner. Dispersed responsibility is rationalized based on a few things: a) HR doesn't know tech, but the tech team doesn't have the business expertise; b) many / every organization will benefit from the HR system, so there's not a standout beneficiary amongst the groups; c) the budget is often cobbled together from across several groups / function. As the saying goes, when everyone's responsible, nobody is responsible.

What's the solve? We need to stop thinking of HR systems as... well, "systems," to which we assign an "administrator" for support. This mentality and approach relegates it to backend bureaucracy land, where hopes and dreams go to die under the weight of a billion fields arrayed across a moribund UX. Every system is basically the living incarnation of Sarbanes Oxley, whether it has to do with financial accounting or not. There should be a sign on the first screen warning "Beware ye who dare to enter, and pray to the ticketing gods for your salvation."

Instead, we should treat our HR tech as products. Real live products that need to be developed, promoted, launched, and continually supported and improved over time, with actual users. We must invest the type of energy (and talent) that we put into an external product launch if we hope to realize the kind of usage and benefits that get built into business cases, and for the business case creators and executive sponsors to look back admiringly at it and be able to say, "That's my baby!"

The key elements required for launching and supporting our new HR tech product are consistent with those needed to get any product off the ground:

1.Full-contact ownership. It takes a village to effectively launch a product. But that's insufficient; you also need a true owner, both at the leadership level and at the working level.

• The leader is the one who will sign the contract, champion the vision up/down and across the rest of the execs in the company, and clear roadblocks. She must be truly invested, not just in spirit, but in practice, investing the time and physical / mental energy to help problem solve and authentically champion. There's no plausible deniability aloud; s/he must fully assume the role of the ultimate "throat to choke."
• On-the-ground, we need the product manager, who will provide the vision of what needs to be built and how it will work and drive the execution against it. She must understand deeply the combination of the business need, the user experience that will address that need, and the tech required to make it work. She is *not* an administrator... there's nothing "lean back" about the role, and TPS reports are not a core deliverable. The product manager is at the center of the action, both orchestrating across workstreams and participants (from IT, to privacy and legal, to comms, to training, to external partners) and diving in deep herself. To paraphrase Walter White, she is "the one who knows." It takes true leadership, excellent project management around a flexible but solid master plan, a knack for motivating others, and an endless supply of grit.

2.Functional and technical expertise. HR system implementations often suffer from a deficit of both, unfortunately. No matter how great a piece of tech is off-the-shelf, it will never do what your organization needs if it doesn't a) fit into your processes and workflow (existing or adapted), or b) integrate with your tech and data stack (both for HR but also for other areas, e.g., operational and financial). The team behind the product must be informed about and able to directly affect these things, again with the product manager at the center of all of it. We need technologists on the team as well as practitioners.

3.True partnership, both across the teams working to launch and support internally and with vendors providing the solution and/or consultation. So many HR systems are rendered ineffectual because there are competing beliefs and interests on the working team, and it becomes a Frankenstein'd collection of compromises - making nobody happy and ultimately causing the end users to suffer. The HR tech team, the corporate platforms / IT team, the broad HR team, supporting internal functions, and the external technology vendor(s) all need to work together as one unit to develop the best solution, both in capability and implementation. It cannot feel like an endless series of sophie's choices, or it will quickly devolve from trying to launch something useful to a death spiral of blame and ass-covering excuses.

Clear evidence of a flagging HR systems product launch

4.Business-driven motivation. A major issue I've seen with HR system launches is that milestone dates feels remarkably flexible, to the point of being practically non-existent. What enables this - besides the lack of a product manager - is the mentality that "We've survived this long without it; what's another week?" We need to take the opposite stance - every day that we're delayed is another day of sub-optimal work and a massive loss in productivity. The functional need must be connected to real business outcomes. Stop waiting for godot.

The typical HR systems administrator...

I'm also a big fan of public declarations (not just "behind closed doors" but in front of the crowd); the upside is that you're now committed to a goal in a "our ass is on the line" kind of way... the downside is that you can set yourself up for failure if you don't do the work to get it done. So get to work. That's motivation for you.

5.Educational evangelism. "Change management" is the term regularly thrown around by business process improvement types. It's the right idea; we too often take a process-oriented approach to launching things (step a, b, c, etc) and lose sight of the fact that human beings are involved and integral to the success of the effort, so we need to get them ready for / supporting / participating in the change to make it work. The problem I have with "change management" is that it can itself feel very clinical. People need to be inspired to do things - they have to believe there's something in it for them and that it rises to a level that they should actually care about and prioritize. It doesn't necessarily need to reach "pentecostal church on Sunday" levels (that's a tall order for HR tech), but it should be a "heads nodding, stuffing stockers on Christmas morning" kind of thing. That said, empty evangelism is insufficient. People also should be educated through your promotion, as you need to go beyond convincing them to getting them to act differently on a regular basis going forward.

6.Goals and governance. Product managers ship. A hallmark of successful product launches is a war-room like mentality - a number of interconnected workstreams in-flight, with a command-and-control like atmosphere and transparency into who is and isn't doing their job. A HR tech product launch needs specific goals (what's being delivered when, by whom) and a "traffic lights" type of assessment to keep everyone honest. And the key leaders of internal and external teams involved with the launch must all be continually engaged, with a willingness to call early and quickly what's not working and personally take action to rectify it.

The shame of the historical state of HR tech implementations is that there is SO MUCH low-hanging fruit around improving the way we attract, engage, and manage our talent. That's why an incredible amount of time, energy, and capital is flowing into the HR tech space now, both from companies investing (many for the first time in decades) and ventures being started to address needs. It's an exciting area to be in, and it's incredibly rewarding to see the impact you can have if you get it right.

But to realize that ambition, we need to learn from the mistakes of the past and do things differently. Treating HR tech as products to be launched and managed is a crucial step in the right direction.

Full disclosure: I've been part of a couple successful external product launches and am now the "executive sponsor" of two HR systems. One's still in development, and the other has been *not* so hot out of the gate. I'm writing this in part to share some thinking on how we can get/keep them on track, and in part to signify that I'm casting off this "sponsorship" mantle to get in the ring and practice what I preach. We need to hit the "transform" button, and go from administrating two HR systems to launching / actively managing two HR products.

Game on.

The views expressed here are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of my current or past employers. If you would like to read more of my writing, you can follow me here on LinkedIn and/or on Twitter at @chrislouie.

You can also read a few of my other LinkedIn posts:

• A Reality Check for Talent Marketing
• Can LinkedIn Solve the "Time Well Spent" Paradox?
• How to Market Data Products Effectively