HR’s Agile Transformation: A Gradual Evolution

A hairy beast!

But, using our agile delivery model, the process was broken down and prioritized and then reviewed and improved.

First, we split the critical elements of the delivery of the project into 4-week sprints covering December to March. 

The project deliverables were assigned to a sprint, each deliverable having an owner.

The project was then given top priority for each of the sprints ensuring that everyone concerned could carve out enough time to deliver their part. If there were issues they were flagged quickly as it was a key priority.

Each sprint was reviewed and any challenges with delivery (resource, capability, system) were discussed and fixed.

The critical part of this was making sure everyone knew what was to be done in each sprint and, because it was prioritized ahead of other projects, everyone had plenty of warning to review their other projects and priorities to ensure they had enough time to deliver salary review.  

Adjusting your planning using this type of prioritization makes it much clearer what can’t be achieved and provides clear boundaries for the team about what to say no to.

Secondly, the whole project was reviewed (as you should with all projects) with a “washup”. 

Feedback was gathered from HR stakeholders, finance, managers, and employees (using direct feedback that was sought or given and from regular employee surveys).

All of the issues (unsatisfactory raise, the methodology used to split review amongst teams, the training, the process, the timings, the system interface, etc), were assessed, prioritized, broken down into individual elements, assigned to owners, and added to the backlog with a deadline of November (the month before the process restarts) by the project owner.  

Many of these elements were tiny, for example poor wording in training materials or a lack of understanding about how something works. Others were bigger requiring systems development, testing, and adjustment of future training materials.

Each piece of feedback was listened to, reviewed, and replied to (where possible) and those giving the feedback were involved in the testing.  

For example, if someone gave the feedback that the training material wasn’t clear about something, then they were sent the adjusted training material to check it was improved.  

It’s great to work in this way because you’re concentrating on improving the experience and recognizing that feedback is listened to and acted upon.

So, overall, how did this methodology improve things? 

The main challenge had always been one of salary reviews hitting at a busy time and a feeling of members of the team being overwhelmed by multiple requests to do things.  

The prioritization process made it clear to everyone what they must do and what they can push back on, which allowed management to focus on reprioritizing other projects.

This was a huge improvement.  

Secondly, the approach of listening to the feedback after the project, collating the improvements, and fixing them bit by bit gave us a better process over time.

Project Two: Onboarding

We undertook a significant project to try and improve onboarding for new employees across many countries. This included:

• Getting new employees to add their personal details directly into the HR system themselves vs filling out paper forms or digital forms which were then added to the HR system by HR
• Employees choosing their benefit selections online before joining
• Digitizing all of the documentation that requires signing, moving that to digital signatures, and adding them to the HR system

Overall, there were 5 local onboarding experiences and around 6 that were local per 15 countries—so roughly 95 pieces of work or experiences that needed digitizing.  

A project like this is a classic example of “boiling the ocean”—where do you start? How long will it take? It can feel overwhelming!

But, by approaching this project using an agile methodology, we were able to break all of these items into manageable chunks.

We used the sprint methodology to make progress with a combination of global and local items. 

We were also able to link some of the work to other projects, for example a new pension provider in country X meant that digitizing the pension process for country X was completed simultaneously with the onboarding.

The prioritization process was critical in ensuring that the global elements were completed when the global team had time and the local items, which required work and testing from specific local teams, could be prioritized around their needs. 

Most of the items were relatively small and we got more efficient as we progressed.

As a management team, we were able to see, measure, and influence the progress of the wider project but each item and deliverable was fairly small.

This was a great way to approach this project as some of the items were harder to achieve than others. 

So, if we ran into an issue with one benefit in a country with a small number of employees, we were quickly able to bypass an item, put into place clear documentation and process on how to manage it, and move on to the next one. 

We weren’t aiming for perfection by X date, we were aiming for incremental improvements month over month.

So, overall, the conclusion to the onboarding project was that by tackling every piece individually—with a strategic aim of digitization and self-service—we were able to make progress on day one without a huge plan and rapidly deliver benefits to the organization in employee experience and cost savings.

Why Agile Is The Future

As work continues to increase in pace, complexity, and volatility, working in long, inflexible, multi-year waterfall methodologies has inherent weaknesses. 

Adopting an agile methodology and mindset gives you many benefits such as:

• Prioritization
• Clear deliverables for all team members
• Breaks down silos and brings teams together
• Breaks the bigger projects down into manageable pieces
• Greater visibility to the wider business on what you’re working on
• Measurable iterative improvements
• Clearer connection of HR to wider business needs and objectives
• Better demand and capability management

In addition to adopting the agile work methodology, creating an agile work environment for your employees is another way to make them thrive independently and as teams.