Project management is HR Transformation’s best friend: a true story of one project
Digitalization and agility are now ways of life and speed up business transformation, which drastically affects people and their work. HR takes a leading role in workplace transformation and lends a supporting hand to business in the upskilling of companies’ workforce with the primary focus on strategic capabilities and competencies. It also hastens ongoing HR transformation processes and sharps attention on becoming more analytical, more agile, more digital, and more competent in handling challenges. At the same time, these trends nourish another global tendency — the skyrocketing importance of project management.
Starting from some level of tasks, project management is equally applied to traditional project-oriented fields as well as to various other functional areas.
The whole bench of tasks within any functional area can be split into four major categories:
- administrative,
- operational,
- tactical,
- strategic.
As a general rule, each job consists of a combination of different tasks related to one or several levels. For successful fulfilment of administrative and operational tasks, an incumbent apparently does not need project management lore, while tasks on the remaining two levels call for at least some understanding of the project management principles and their practical usage. I would like to illustrate this statement for one of the non-project-oriented functional areas — human resources.
Often HR is perceived as a process-oriented, conservative, and purely supportive or administrative function within a company, which is far away from agility and project management. It might be true for some small and mid-size businesses, where strategic and partially tactical tasks related to different functional areas are concentrated in the hands of company owners, that the primary focus of their HR function is to be operational and administrative tasks like filing documents, capturing data in HRMS, preparing contracts, benefits administration (administrative); payroll, recruiting, bonus calculation, organization, and delivery of trainings (operational). However, for companies with a standing focus on diverse modern concepts and models aimed to transform the HR function and shift it to an advanced level, a set of tactical and strategic tasks increasingly occupies a significant share of an HR work-routine and project management becomes in demand. Examples of tasks in these categories can be: (re)design and implementation of HR processes, learning curriculum design, target setting (tactical); conceptualize and design of people strategy, talent management strategy, learning strategy, total reward policy (strategic).
In other words, HR incorporates plenty of areas where a rational application of project management principles and methods can speedup, systematize, organize, simplify a realization of HR programs and initiatives, reduce the perception-bias of the HR function as an exclusively administrative one, and provide a sustainable ground for a successful HR transformation.
I would classify typical HR-activities where employment of project management yields tangible benefits as:
- responsive projects;
- value-add projects;
- digitalization;
- any combination of these categories.
Responsive projects are reactions of the HR function to a business strategy of a company, aimed to support achievements of concrete business targets. For example, if a company’s strategic business goal is an expansion to new market segments, a reflection of it on the HR side most probably will be programs and projects in the following areas:
- competency management (assessment of competencies within a company, defining gaps between available and future required knowledge/ skills/ competencies, defining development and recruitment strategies to close these gaps, etc.),
- learning and development (whom and how to develop and upskill),
- recruiting (whom and how to attract, select and integrate),
- audit of internal processes and infrastructure to define and estimate needs to scale/ optimize/ rebuild/ automate existing HR processes and set up new ones, etc.
Value-add projects are proactive mind-changing initiatives suggested and driven by HR, which are derived from and tightly linked to the vision of a company and aimed to create an internal working environment and a corporate culture in the ‘things to grow’-mode. Often this category of projects lays in the areas of employee experience, agile learning organization, leadership development, employee engagement, change management, and others. These projects require mid- and long-term focus and commitment of a company’s top management, significant investments, and a standing revision of HR processes. Sometimes it is difficult to justify the return-on-investment (ROI) for these projects, and their share in a company project portfolio is always a topic for discussion. Significant internal and/or external changes of business environments regularly make a stress-test for businesses. However, a company, that pays enough attention to value-added HR projects, has higher chances to surmount obstacles and to catch opportunities. The current worldwide stress-test called COVID-19 clearly demonstrates that companies started to pay attention to and invest in value-add HR projects before this pandemic, dispose now of better-prepared HR processes, employees, managers, and corporate culture to face and overcome the challenges.
Digitalization is another category mostly dealing with the automation of HR processes. These projects are often derived from responsive and value-add ones. For the technical part of them, the HR function is to act as a project owner to ensure a proper bridge between the HR and IT sides. Digitalization always embodies some changes, and as a consequence, some resistance is likely to pop up. Therefore, the importance of a non-technical side of a project should not be underestimated. HR has a driver’s seat for it and usually extends this role to all digitalization projects in a company.
Because of the interconnectivity of all people-related topics within an organization, usually it is difficult to separate these categories one from another. In practice, a strategic impetus from the top expands to a variety of sub-projects and mind-changing initiatives covering all types of HR projects. To illustrate this, I would like to share a true story of how one responsive project had opened the doors to multiple value-add and digitalization HR projects and laid the first bricks into a successful HR transformation in a company.
Once upon a time, I joined a country-based HR department of a huge international corporation. From year to year, the business volume of our country had steady minor growth, but it was not enough to overcome the internal label of a “small country” on the global business landscape of the corporation. From a headcount perspective, the situation was similar: our 600 employees were just a drop in the corporate ocean. Our HR department was mainly concentrated on operational and administrative tasks to support immediate business needs. At the same time, we were included in the global HR communication streams, had good connections with colleagues in other countries, and were aware of new trends and methods recommended by HQ HR to be applied in regional companies. Our attempts to discuss and agree upon required changes in working methods with the country management usually faced a polite ignorance and HR business partnering has been standing shelved for better times.
The situation has changed overnight: during regular monitoring of market tendencies and potentials in countries HQ has concluded that our region had a potential for booming growths in different industrial segments. As a result, our business has been challenged to triple its volume in two years, which would allow our regional company to enter a higher corporation-league. One of the required actions to ensure successful achievement of this target was a task to HR: “double a company staff in two years”. This was a typical example of a responsive HR project: time-boxed activities to create a unique result as a response to a business initiative. To meet objectives, it was required to set up a lot of new processes, implement supportive tools, arrange proper in-time communication, and coordinate interconnected activities with other areas.
My opening task as a project manager was a thoroughly planned and organized kick-off to agree with stakeholders on the “rules of the game”: goals, scope, deliverables, phases, milestones, quality control measures, resources, budget, communication, and procedures, i.e. escalation, change requests, etc. Starting from the announcement of this project HR was in a “catching up mode” and my project team ran behind the train of business transformation, trying to catch on to the last carriage. At the beginning of the project, time was one of the most critical resources with a zero reserve. Initially, I planned to keep the corporate standards for industrial projects and to follow the waterfall approach. However, the first precise planning session and an attempt to elaborate a workable decomposition of tasks and a project schedule revealed a lot of uncertainty and volatility in some critical project phases. It was dangerous conditions for a project that completely followed the predictive approach and with an ultimate shortage of time. After presenting a risk analysis to the project sponsor and key stakeholders, my change request was approved, and I could change the standard approach to a hybrid one. I’ve reorganized the project into a main operational recruiting stream and sub-projects: for some of them the waterfall approach was reasonably applied, for the rest adaptive approaches were deployed.
One of the most essential sub-projects was an implementation of an E-recruiting system. Its successful in-time completion allowed the project team to catch the train and to start moving between carriages of the business transformation. Five years later, lessons learned from this digitalization helped us tremendously during the launch of SuccessFactors. Another sub-project was tightly linked to the “Attract”-phase of the recruiting process. Employer branding activities, university liaison, and a referral program were parts of this sub-project, and they were pilots for setting up channels for regular HR communication to employees and candidates.
A sub-project related to the “Select”-phase of the recruiting process besides some initially planned activities, like to train interview skills of HR and hiring managers, has been extended to different candidates’ assessment tools. This extension later served as a basis for an HR value-add project devoted to the validation of talents.
It is worth mentioning another sub-project: strategic workforce planning. It was not initially included in the project scope, however, in the second year of the project realization, it turned crystal clear, that without accurate strategic workforce planning and its bridge to budget planning on the level of business units, the quality targets of new hires could not be hit. The moment, when a business has followed this HR initiative, was a signal that our HR was not far away from the locomotive and sometimes could proactively influence business. Besides the planning and budgeting processes on the business side, strategic workforce planning has deep connectivity to HR areas: competency management, talent management, and succession planning. Some years later, several value-add projects derived from the competency management area employed these results and brought the personnel planning process in the company to the next level.
And last, but not least, was a sub-project related to the “Integrate”-phase of the recruiting process. It was the only one, which initial scope has not been significantly changed during the project realization. Nevertheless, some outcomes of this sub-project served as an impetus for other value-add HR projects like an employee engagement survey.
Due to employed from the project management methodology proper monitoring, a consequential realization of phases and sub-projects with a standing focus on a “big picture”, lessons learned, risk analysis and quality control, as well as the immediate implementation of corrective actions, allowed my team to hit in-time operational recruiting targets and to complete the project with well-turned, easily manageable and scalable recruiting processes, an effectively tailored E-recruiting system, and a recognition as a partner from hiring managers. Additionally, the successful project realization had plenty of positive side-effects for our local HR organization. It turned out that involved hiring managers were a critical mass of middle and line managers, who started to spread their partner attitude to other HR areas. Before it was one of the missing elements for the HR function to be recognized as a trusted business partner. This noticeable change of attitude encourages our HR department to foster activities on the internal brand of HR, change of the company’s culture, deeper collaboration with business by offering various value-add HR projects and delivering results, and step by step moving in the directions of the strategic HR business partnering and HR transformation.
Looking back and analyzing factors that supported successful realizations of this and further HR projects in our regional company, the key role should be attributed to project management. Within a well-established corporate project management culture on the business side, its adoption and utilization on the HR side showed up as a “magic pill” or the shortest way to find a common language and speedup the trustful partnership with business at all organizational levels, and to ensure a noticeable move into the desired transformation of the HR function.