One of the critical success factors for implementing SAP HR software is Change Management. It's also one of the most difficult parts of a project to do well. Unfortunately, many implementation projects starve it for resources and some give it only token support. When you look around at SAP projects that have failed, it's often due to change management failures, not the underlying SAP technology.
Changing business processes can be tough, and it's even more difficult to change peoples' jobs. When we look at changing what people do, and how they do it, we might end up redefining a job in a way that no longer fits the person doing it. This is quite common in SAP HR projects because the system takes over a lot of the manual calculations and work, leaving the more analytical work for those in HR. It is difficult for an HR, Benefits or Payroll specialist - who has been doing the same job for 10, 20 or more years with the same software system – to internalize the change needed to be productive with a new SAP HR system. And it is vitally important that your core-HR users are comfortable and proficient in SAP HR so that all those transactions run smoothly and accurately. Without a good core-HR function, nothing else in HR will work at its full potential.
So change is tough, and we handle it a few different ways. First, we change the SAP HR software to make it work like the old system. In some cases that's fine, and in most cases it is the wrong thing to do. Second – we make an effort to train and retrain users; many times we ignore the results when some users fail to catch-on. We are doing them a disservice when we ignore the results. Third, and rarely, we bring in new people with new skills to work with the core-HR processes. Fourth, and finally, we talk ourselves out of the impact this change will have or resign ourselves to the mistaken fact that we can't change things; we talk about it but choose not to take action. Denial might be the most common way of handling change.
Most every project has unfinished change management. There are users who just didn't respond well to the training and change management – but we keep them on anyway because they've been there for a long time or we don't have anywhere else to put them. We continue to do things the old way even though it is extra effort compared to a newer SAP-way because people have a vested interest in the old way, or we don't fully understand or trust the SAP-way, or a few dozen other reasons. Users continue to do things manually outside the system because they were not taught well enough to put that work into the system. We make the new SAP HR system work like the old one because that's all we know to do, and it's comfortable.
All of that is understandable; but what we fail to do is assign a cost to this unfinished change management. There is a real cost to all of that. How much is this unfinished change management costing you? It's hard to know if you don't know what good change management looks like, but based on my experience most companies could save at least 25% on their labor costs if change management was done properly and completely. This is tough work – it involves changing the work and peoples' jobs, after all – but it is better than living with poor processes and jobs that reduce productivity and keep expenses higher than they could be.