11 hours in a conference room

Long day but it was actually a good expreience. We’re having a strategy meeting about upgrading our full PS environment – 4 HRMS instances, sPro, EPM and Enterprise Portal – to 8.9. We started with sharing a definition of our target state. These are the carve-em-in-stone principles we want to deliver and/or achieve, regardless of requirements or technology. They’re simple and high level:

• a quality user expreience,
• timely and accurate data sourcing and feeds management,
• powerful and practical reporting and
• maximal system and service consolidation.

These four objectives contain many characteristics or best practices, each of which in turn will expand out to identified gaps between the as-is and terget state. The first order of business was to get agreement on the objectives and characteristics. Having that, we then went around the room with each functional owner speaking to the top of mind gaps in their areas, which we managed to filter into a single list of key gaps from a global perspective. Some of these will take years to address, others hang low but now we all agree on what they are. Everybody has to go hame and produce an exhaustive catalog.

The next stage was to identify what we wanted to achieve with 8.9 from a purely business side. How are we improving processes, enhancing services, shortening cycles, etc. The plus is that we now have a common ste of standards by which to measure any aspect of this effort – if it doesn’t deliver on one of the target state characteristics, we can fairly ask why we’re doing it. Further, with each of the 4 regional HRMS managers present in the room, talking to their goals, there was ample opportunity for sharing and comparing that was exercised in a really positive way.

By 6:30 PM we broke to go to dinner after an spontaneous whiteboard session between EMEA and Asia-Pacific on tree standardization, inspired by the warehouse and North America discussions on their respective approaches. Much lubrication followed and people were voicing their wonderment that we hadn’t started like this 3 years ago when we took this effort on on a global scale. Honestly, we didn’t have the luxury of strategy back then. We were racing a clock and a leaky budget, and we had to get the ‘plumbing’ in place. We made a lot of compromises and there’s no question that what we’re doing now is unraveling some of that.

I believe that with a vision, communications and a strong group working together we’re going to realize some cool achievements. With some blood and guts spilled, no doubt.

Orace is telling us about 8.9 and Fusion tomorrow. I’ll have to see what I can share, we’re under non-disclosure.