How The Largest (Outsourced) HR IT Project Is Being Managed
Posted January 1st, 2008 by DiscussHR
You think you face an out of control project that defies management? Then let’s look at how the federal government of the US works when it has new projects. Oftentimes the programs are under-resourced, leadership emphasis comes and goes, and you can count on a management “flavor of the month.” Often you have multiple leaders, the White House, Congress and federal agencies, and everyone is trying to get a piece of the action. Many IT projects become mired in conflicting chiefs and a changing agenda. Many projects end up self-destructing.
So coordinating Enterprise Human Resources Integration, the massive computerization of human resources records of the federal government’s Office of Personnel Management (OPM) and 214 federal agencies, served as a supreme challenge for the Center for Organizational Excellence (COE), a Rockville, Maryland management consulting company. “This would be the largest human resource system ever built. Wal-Mart is second. It will hold 1.8 million employee records and 30 years of history,” said Steve Goodrich, president of COE. Further, it was one of the president’s 24 eGovernment initiatives. That made it high-profile and put much -- including reputations -- at stake.
Its impact would reach across the entire government. “It’s an HR system that impacts all federal agencies and employees. Data has to be exchanged with agencies and moved onto the desktop,” Mr. Goodrich explained.
Working on the project with COE at the beginning, in June 2003, were five key partners: Idea Integration, an IT integrator responsible for developing and coding the software system; Integic Corp. (bought early in 2005 by Northrop-Grumman), to develop the electronic official personnel folders (EOPF in federal government lingo); AT&T, to develop the tools for federal agencies to analyze their workforces and perform forecasting; Lockheed-Martin; and Excella Consulting. One company is no longer part of the project. (More about that shortly.)
In this case study, Mr. Goodrich shares his advice for working on broad, ambitious outsourced projects that have multiple leaders, shifting priorities and a variable budget.
- TIP #1: You have to set clear direction and establish decision-making, even when you know things will change.
- TIP #2: Use some kind of project management framework.
- TIP #3: Proximity counts. Get people together physically and frequently to get the work done.
- TIP #4: Incorporate quality assurance. Get users involved regularly to make sure the quality applies to what really matters about the project.
- TIP #5: Expect the unexpected to hit you in some form.
- TIP #6: Be flexible about deliverables when push comes to shove.
- TIP #7: Build change management into the system.