Cutover and the Transition to Business as Usual

With the system and processes now tested and accepted by the HR and business user communities, the attention turns to the planning and execution of the cutover to the new system and processes. Whilst there are distinct technology and process facets to this stage, they are more closely interdependent than those in the build and test stage. Indeed, the interdependency with the capabilities work is also critical as these streams of work need to cut over as a coordinated whole rather than as separate entities. Clearly, the technology and processes need to be in place for the transactional responsibility to shift but the new capabilities within the HR function must also be in place if HR is to vacate its transactional role.

From a technology perspective, the main activities are the following:

• to ensure that the live technical environment (hardware, software and network) is ready for the HR system;
• to ensure that the data are ready to be loaded and the mechanism for performing the load, often a combination of automated and manual approaches, is also ready;
• to ensure all users have the means to access the new system;
• to develop the technical cutover plans.

From a process perspective, the main activities are the following:

• The scheduling and delivery of the system and process training. Often the change leaders take a role in this either as trainers themselves or in a 'train the trainer' role.
• Business cutover planning, including planning data reconciliations, system down-time and any parallel running of the old system and new.

Before the live cutover is performed, many programmes opt for an integrated cutover rehearsal that coordinates the whole technology and process cutover and determines how long and in what precise order each element is addressed.

Throughout this stage and towards the latter part of the build and test stage, the hub of the change shifts from something that the programme is 'pushing out' to the organisation to something that the organisation is embracing and 'pulling in'. The increased involvement of the line areas and HR in the programme is a major catalyst in this. This is then consolidated during this stage, as the transition from the programme team to those responsible for supporting the new system and processes is effected. This is an important symbol in the transition to the new 'business as usual' and begins to draw to a close the 'implement change' phase of the change cycle model. How to embed the targets and benefits from the transformation programme into business as usual to ensure that these benefits are realised. However, successfully hitting the transformation targets and delivering benefits is not only dependent on getting these targets incorporated into business plans and business as usual but is also dependent on embedding the technology and processes.

The change readiness and impact assessments will have identified where there is resistance to the new technology and processes and the reasons for this resistance. It is important that during the cutover phase, the programme targets this resistance and produces communications, training and briefings that specifically address the reasons why different groups are resistant to change. For example, managers may resist self-service because they regard capturing and managing sickness absence and leave as an additional overhead and 'HR's job'. The communications should emphasise that self-service will make entering this information easier, as it will go straight into a system rather than on a paper form and once it is entered into the system, managers will be able to view reports that provide quick and instant data on staff attendance, thereby enabling the managers to more easily manage and balance staffing across the different working shifts. The advantages of the self-service system will mean that managers are more likely to adopt the new technology and ways of working.

A useful tool to support adoption and embedding of new technology and ways of working can be the 'Day In the Life Of' tool. This tool involves shadowing key managers for a period of time to understand the pressures they face and what they have to deliver on a day-to-day basis. The data collected during this exercise is then analysed and used to identify how self-service and new ways of working will improve managers' jobs. These improvements can be placed into communications, on the Intranet or presented as scenarios in workshops. This enables managers to better understand how the new processes and technology will work and gives them a reason and incentive to adopt and embed the new ways of working. How to ensure that managers not only adopt the new technology and processes but also continue to work differently and deliver benefits after the programme has been disbanded.

Build and Test | Process and Technology

There are two main alternative approaches to this stage and it is important that you choose the right approach for your circumstances. The first approach is prototyping; that is, the incremental configuration of elements of the systems solution followed by testing with the users followed by further iterations of fine-tuning. This process is repeated for all elements of the systems solution. The second is a full build against a detailed specification or blueprint followed by full system testing.

One advantage with the first approach is that the HR and business users get the opportunity to see and feel HR self-service quite early in the build process. This serves to maintain momentum and enthusiasm and helps to match expectations against system delivery. The main disadvantage with this approach is that it can take longer unless it is tightly managed — the temptation can be to continue with minor refinements rather than to end that element of the solution and move on to the next.

In the case of the second approach, the main advantage is that you have better control of the costs and schedule and at the end of the build you have a more complete solution. But there is less possibility of making changes during the build and after it is delivered any changes will be more expensive. There is a heavy reliance on the quality of the detailed specification that the system configurers are using.

During this stage, there is a greater distinction between the technology- and the process-related activities than during the detailed design stage. Even with the prototyping approach, the system configurers are primarily focused on the technology build and system test activity. The HR and business users, however, should be primarily focused on operating procedure definition, training course preparation, development of user security profiles, test script development and user acceptance testing. The methodology and programme plan provide the means of linking the process and technology (and people) streams here. The interdependencies and 'touch points' are closely aligned through this even though the team members may be working on their own specific tasks.

The change management theme of course continues. The change leaders mobilised during detailed design perform the next iteration of impact and readiness assessments, often at the local functional or site level, and initiate the resulting actions. The change focus should not be restricted to the line areas; HR must be preparing for this change. There is an important link here with the capabilities work, as HR needs to get ready to let go of much of the transactional work and begin to focus on what the business partner role really means and how they will equip themselves for this. An excellent way of bringing this to life is the use of 'conference room pilots' where the business and HR users of Web-based HR technology adopt their new roles in a controlled environment, testing how the new roles, process and system fit together in a simulation of the new environment.

Conference room pilots provide a good example of how wider involvement in the programme activities can be achieved and there is greater opportunity during this stage to use involvement in the programme activities as an action to promote awareness and commitment. Typically, involvement from HR and the business in defining operating procedures, preparing training course material and particularly user acceptance testing, make the programme 'come alive' for many. One area that provides excellent opportunity for involvement but is often neglected is that of data cleansing and preparation. This involves checking the validity of existing data, mapping it to the data required in the new system and creating any additional data fields that are not present in the current systems. Involvement in this can be achieved across all employees in the organisation as they are requested to check and validate their own individual employee record data. This is a very powerful approach to moving the perception of the HR transformation programme from concept to reality.

Impact and Readiness Assessment

The starting point for assessing impact and readiness is that the stakeholder identification and initial impact and assessment have already been completed. The task at this stage is to take the initial analysis down to the next level of detail both in terms of the stakeholder groups themselves, the understanding of the impact on those groups and the levels of resistance-commitment. For example, during initial stakeholder analysis all employees may have been treated as a homogeneous group. This would now be too broad for the differing impacts that they may experience. Therefore, the employee stakeholder group may, in this case, be subdivided into office-based employees and shop floor—based employees in order to take account of the differing impacts of HR self-service technology in their respective areas. The key here is to balance the degree to which stakeholder groups are subdivided. As a rule of thumb, the level of department on a particular site is usually the lowest level of subdivision necessary.

Then for each of the detailed stakeholder groups, the impacts are recorded for each relevant process in terms of change from the 'as is' way of working to the 'to be' way. Clearly, not every process impacts every stakeholder group and the degree of impact differs in each case. From this, a picture of relative impact emerges. Those groups with the greatest impact are often those where most attention must be paid in the change planning that follows.

At this stage, it is also useful to assess the readiness to change for each detailed stakeholder group. This readiness assessment concentrates on the attitude that the detailed stakeholder groups have towards the new processes and systems. There are a number of factors listed here:

1. History of change within the organisation: Has change been managed effectively previously?
2. What is the capacity for change in the organisation? Have major change initiatives been recently completed or are under way?
3. What is the level of awareness of the detailed stakeholder group as to the nature of the change for them?
4. And finally, 'what's in it for me?' On balance, will the detailed stakeholder group view this as a positive or negative change, bearing in mind the nature of the impact on them?

There are a number of approaches to undertaking a readiness assessment, and they are summarised in Figure 1.

Tool	What is it?	How & when to use it?
Questionnaires	A set of questions usually in a tick box format They can be done as paper exercises, by e-mail or via the intranet	They can be sent out to a variety of stakeholders They can be used to gather a lot of information quickly from a large number of people They are often used as the first vehicle to identify areas that need to be probed in more detail
Focus Groups	A workshop with a group of people (5–15) to elicit more detail about why particular issues have been raised	They are usually run either as natural work groups, or as representatives from various stakeholder groups Format and content are changed to suit group characteristics and issue(s) to be discussed They allow the 'why' to be explored in more depth
One-to-One Interviews	A structured interview where individuals are asked a number of questions and answers are recorded and analysed	These are either used to elicit information around sensitive areas or to ascertain how aligned a particular group is around each stage of the project They are often used with leadership and managerial groups

Figure 1: Approaches to readiness assessment.

When using questionnaires or working with focus groups or conducting one-to-one interviews, examples of questions to assess change readiness can include the following:

	Disagree			Agree
Are you aware of which self-service tools will be rolled out to your business unit and which ones you will need to use?	1	2	3	4	5
Do you understand how the self-service tools will work?	1	2	3	4	5
Do you understand your role and responsibilities for using the tools as a manager?	1	2	3	4	5