When I ask project managers and sponsors ‘What are the goals for your SAP HCM project?’ the one I hear most often is something like this: ‘To replace the legacy system with SAP’. Sometimes they might add a goal or two to that - like implementing self-service, or automating compensation planning. Press a little more and they will say they want to do all that within their budget.
Those sorts of goals are fairly inadequate though: what’s their real business impact? Why not have a goal that is more meaningful from a business perspective? Why not say that the goal is to improve ROI, efficiency, or costs by 50% for a certain set of processes? A goal could be to handle growth by 10,000 employees without increasing staffing in the HR functions. Or save $1 million/yr in costs by consolidating HR operations & systems from three divisions into one service center. These are much more measurable goals where we can clearly define success. Those sorts of goals can serve as a touchstone for all the design and implementation choices along the way.
Holding people accountable to measurable goals that have an impact on the business has a way of bringing focus, efficiency, and effectiveness to a project. And maybe that is why projects don’t always go so well. In many companies, the only thing that gets measured in HR functions is the budget. If all I can measure against is a budget, timeline and the replacement of an HR system, then that will guide the project.
But that’s like hiring a crew to paint your house and saying they need to stay within a certain budget, without choosing the paint colors or finishes. You will get a repainted house within that budget, but maybe not looking the way you expected. But then, you didn’t specify that, so I suppose it was successful from the crew’s perspective.
There’s an old saying, at least I think it’s old, that when projects start well they tend to end well. Part of having a good start is having clear, measurable, meaningful business-oriented goals that everyone is aligned with and are used to guide the project’s decisions. Do that right, and much of the rest will go much better.