Before the HR Platform Locks In

We started with the fine print. The contract documents for a fixed-price, multi-wave implementation were read clause by clause in under a week. 35 risks emerged across 7 categories, from finance and governance to delivery, scope, resourcing, technology and data: 6 critical, 16 high. The headline was simple: the fixed price was a floor, not a ceiling, because so much depended on what the organisation itself had to provide.

Then a register people could negotiate from, in their hands within days. Each risk was written in plain language, with its consequence, and ranked into 6 priorities for the table: internal experts committed to half their time for more than 2 years, too few payroll test runs, no data processing agreement, change management days with no framework behind them. The review was explicitly not legal advice; the organisation’s lawyers ran their own, and both met in the negotiation.

Then the people who would live with the platform. A third of HR leaders said they had little view of a programme that would reshape their own work, so the offsite aligned before it decided. Each of 11 modules got a vote, cast privately before the room saw the result: keep, evolve or reinvent. Only analytics drew reinvention, at 62%; the help desk and learning would stay largely as they were, performance would evolve. The pattern: reinvent where the data is, keep where the service works.

Then what software could not settle. 24 HR services were mapped against the platform, and 8 sat outside it: who would cover them? When should performance management be redesigned, a question on which the room split? And did HR have the people to do it, with most of the function tied up in daily operations? These became a short list of choices only leadership could make, beside a heat map of ambition per module.