Marketing and IT: Help Round Out Your System Implementation Team

A good project team for an HR systems implementation is complete with HR/payroll professionals and the executive sponsor… simple? Not so fast my friend. You want and need great not good, so you should consider including two other important departments: marketing and IT.

While the team members from these two departments might not be as involved or familiar with the HR systems as your HR and payroll people, it’s easier to include them from the beginning than to surprise them with information and tasks at the end. Depending on the vendor selected and the project, you may not need much of their time.

Reasons to Include Marketing

• Website
  How does the new system work with the current website? A lot of companies choose to manage talent acquisition through their HRIS, but how does impact the website and what the public sees. As Jane Austen once said, “[I]t is a truth universally acknowledged, that a marketer in possession of a website, must be in want of more page views.” Okay, our marketing team says this isn’t quite a fair representation of what marketers want, but it can be important to their metrics. While marketing should be caring about quality of page views and not purely quantity, it is important to discuss how the changes could impact their metrics. A major dip in page views because the talent acquisition module and portal directs to another a page is necessary for them to understand.Additionally, what does the public see? A key responsibility for your marketing team is brand reputation and website experience is a major portion of that reputation. A lot of times the user experience shifts dramatically when you introduce a portal on to your website. That can cause harm to your company’s reputation if it isn’t a positive experience.
• Communication and Visuals
  How are you going to roll out changes? Internal employee communication tends to float in a nebulous area between marketing and human resources. Do you have standards for visuals and presentations? If so, make sure your new HR initiatives adhere to those standards when possible. At the very least work with your marketing team to ensure the messaging and visual identity is consistent with what the organization is doing as a whole.

Reasons to Include IT

• Resource Capabilities and Restrictions
  Most new systems are in the cloud, meaning they don’t have to have significant server space or other programs to run and manage them, however, IT will need to be included to ensure your current infrastructure can handle and communicate with the new system. Some systems require certain updates to be made. Are there firewalls in place that could keep employees from accessing the system? Will regular password updates break automated updates?Are you adding self-services capabilities to your organization? How will employees access that information? Will there be computers and internet where you need it to be? It doesn’t do a lot of good to purchase and implement self-serve capabilities if you can’t actually get it to employees.
• Website
  Yep, we’re back to the website. Depending on how things work at your organization, IT may be responsible for connecting the system to the website. Discuss the resources and time commitments with IT. Sometimes it’s as easy as inserting a simple code, but other times it is much more involved and could take considerably more time on their part.