Guest Post By Tony McDonald, Manager of Information Systems at Aquire

The first challenge you’ll face in software hosting is wading through the very poorly defined list of terms  people use in an attempt to label this very nebulous suite of offerings. Some people talk about Software as a Service (SaaS), others will try to convince you that they have the best solution because it’s built on “Cloud Computing,” yet others will push Software + Services, or a hosted solution. Is your head spinning yet?

We don’t have time in this posting to wade through the naming nightmare, so I’ll trust you to accept that I’m talking about all of the above mentioned names.

More important than the name are the end results. What are you getting for your money and time? Is the software going to help make your business successful? Will the vendor provide stellar service to insure the success of the project? We’re going to assume you’ve selected a product that delivers the required functionality. Big leap of faith here, but we’ll also assume that you’ve found a provider who will step up and help insure your company’s success through stellar service and support. 

Let’s look at the benefits and disadvantages of hosting. Please keep in mind that the list below is a generalization and your mileage may vary depending on where you are headed and who is behind the wheel.

Pros:

• Much quicker to deploy than traditional in-house software projects
• Ongoing updates are delivered with much less effort than in-house software
• Minimal if any investment in infrastructure – reducing project startup costs
• No additional overhead for internal IS to support additional systems
• Cost is spread out instead of up front (You end up paying only for what you use)
• Training is usually easier because demonstration systems are immediately available

Cons:

• Often not as easy to customize as an in-house software project
• Software data is housed at the vendor’s location and you are relying on them to maintain a secure and stable environment
• Greater risk should the provider get out of the business of providing hosted software
• May not be as tightly integrated with existing software systems as an in house solution

Summary:

Your vendor will be the key to a successful deployment. Ask a few questions before diving in. Have they been around long? Do they have any reference customers for the service you are purchasing? Be specific in your requests. Do they have any training references? Do they have any references from a company that struggled during deployment? It’s vital to understand how your vendor deals with difficulties during deployment.

As the methods of deployment change, the reasons IS/IT projects fail remain the same. All the things on the business side of your project that might cause an in-house solution to fail will also cause a hosted solution to fail.         

Stay focused on your company’s business goals. Don’t let the cloud of “Cloud Computing” obscure your view of those goals. It can be an expedient and price friendly way to deploy a new solution, but be sure it aligns to your business first.

We win either way!

The first weekend of November, I will be attending an event in Louisville, KY that would never have been possible to create 10 years ago. Forget the fact that there likely were not enough (read as “any”) HR Bloggers around to make a gathering. What I’m talking about is the ability of a group of  geographic strangers to meet online and introduce each other to their electronic network of friends who are also passionate about HR. These people are so passionate about recruiting, human resources, workforce planning, succession planning, career development, and all things work/life/people related  that they share their wisdom, rants, ideas, and questions via their blogs. Often, these blogs are  written on their own time, sometimes they are corporate supported. The point is they communicate.

These friends chat via Twitter. They recommend each other’s blog posts. They find ways to share and communicate in the nonelectronic world, too. Then an amazing thing happened. Trish McFarlane and Ben Eubanks (whom we have not seen nearly enough of on Twitter lately) hatched the idea that this talented network of HR professionals needed to learn from each other in a more concentrated venue. So, they hatched the idea of an HR Bloggers gathering. They named it HRevolution.  What I don’t know is, have they realized the true coolness of this event beyond the fact that we are all going to learn to be better bloggers? We are going to become better HR professionals but we’re also experiencing a new way to create brain trusts in a rapid fire, get it organized, light the spark and let it happen way.

I know that the, now four, organizers (see the awesome list of individuals below) have jumped through hoops to pull off what has now become a 50 person gathering. Yet, I challenge all of us to not be fearful and use this concept as a way to bring together previously unmet individuals to solve a problem, inspire development, strategize a plan, et al, by connecting. Gather people in your social network, bring them together, toss out your challenges and watch the great minds move further ahead than you could ever dream of doing on your own. Can you tell I am psyched about HRevolution? I am also excited about exploring whole new ways of building new collaborative teams.

Check out the HRrevoultion site and see the individuals attending. Most of them have blogs or will in the future. Read their stuff, comment on the posts that you enjoy or disagree with, follow them on Twitter. Engage. I promise you will learn.

Huge “thank yous” in advance to

• Trish McFarlane @trishmcfarlane http://hrringleader.wordpress.com/
• Ben Eubanks – @beneubanks http://upstarthr.com
• Crystal Peterson – @crystalpeterson  http://crisscrossed.wordpress.com/
• Steve Boese @steveboese http://steveboese.squarespace.com/

I can’t wait to tell you what happens at the event. I’m sure these blog posts will get better because of it.

This time of year, there is so much air-time used in discussions about building the competency model for position management and getting the right job description defined for compliance purposes, that often the true essence of what’s best for the team and the individuals gets lost when it’s time to open a new position.

I’ve talked about this subject before, but now is the perfect time to bring it up again.If you
want to increase retention of your existing employees as well as for the new hire, here are my suggestions for building the best job description or responsibility matrix possible.

How to optimize position management

1. Inform the manager that a new position is now budgeted. They’ll have the time to better outline what that position will do.
2. Put the manager’s position description on the shelf for awhile.
3. Talk to the employees in that department, especially those with similar duties to the proposed new position, about what gives them energy in their job and what zaps them to exhaustion in their day-to-day routine.
4. List the “keeper tasks” to make sure people get to keep doing those things that add value and give them energy.
5. Compile the “I would rather go to the dentist than do these tasks” list.
6. Review the tasks getting in the way of employee engagement (your list from #5), and look closely for a full-time job description. Throw away the preconceived notion that you “must have another analyst” or whatever the position originally required. If your current employees can be more productive by giving away the things that eat away at their time and energy – you can keep them happy by hiring somebody to do the things they find draining or not a good use of their time.
7. Modify the manager’s original definition for the new position, working with the manager to create a new job description based on the list from #5.
8. Go out and hire a very upbeat person who likes to do the things in the altered job description, who will be well-loved in the department because they saved people from their dreaded tasks.

Now you can do this process before step 1 if the new position must be clearly defined before
budget approval. If you’re thinking to yourself , “that would never work here, that’s not how
things are done,” SHAME ON YOU. Make a change. If you’re thinking, for example, “but nobody likes to compile customer comments into a report,” you’re wrong and need to remember the saying, “It takes all kinds.”

Trust me, this works. I have done it. If you must back up this theory with proven research and align it with a great professional employee development trend then refer to anything recent by Marcus Buckingham and friends: Strengths Finder, Go Put Your Strengths To Work.

Some of this can be done with existing teams, too, even if they’re not adding a position. Discuss what each teammate would love to keep or prefer to give away then see if any tasks can be swapped within the team or reassigned to a different, more qualified department.

As Buckingham demonstrates, letting individuals be the judge of what they do best is truly effective position management.

Cheers,
Lois

Guest Post By Marc Ramos, Director of Corporate Sales at Aquire

 Family life, 60-hour work weeks (if you’re lucky), soccer practices, helping with homework, diaper duty, PTA – in our hectic lives, who has time to join a professional organization, much less volunteer to help run a professional organization?

My response is, “Perhaps you simply start with baby steps.” Joining an HR professional organization is incredibly easy. Many of these organizations offer membership at no charge, resulting in incredible value. Target a group or two that are pertinent to your field, in my case HR groups such as IHRIM, SHRM, or OAUG. Initially, attend a few meetings as a guest, meet the members.

Often times, board members of professional organizations are mistaken for full-time paid employees. I wish! The fact is, many of us, like my fellow board members of OHUG, donate our time, sweat, and tears for lots of reasons. Whatever the reason, the rewards are limitless, both personally and professionally.

So, why join? In a professional group, you can:

• Socialize and network with your peers.
• Learn best practices – which makes you an MVP for your company and a more efficient worker. (And should cut into that 60 hr work week.)
• Learn through shared experiences.
• See cutting edge technologies and solutions.
• Enjoy and have fun – it’s not all work.
• Meet new friends with common interest and similar business anxieties. Life-long friendships are very commonplace.
• Contacts, contacts, contacts – build your personal and professional social network. You never know who you may meet.

Keys to being successful in a professional group; you should:

• Be a resource – offer your skills/knowledge. You will get it back 10-fold.
• Find a mentor or coach. Your mentor will gladly introduce you around.
• Be a kid – kids are the best networkers. Young ones are extremely open minded – don’t put up walls and don’t make judgments.
• Join with a friend and navigate the waters together.
• Smile!

Feeling really bold? Volunteer. Then run for a board position!

Everyone’s always talking about the importance of analytics. “Blah blah blah analytics blah blah.” Of course “analytics” is more than just a buzzword, as you well know. Analytics are an important part of every HR team’s decision making and planning initiatives. And yes, you know you need them. But as many a toddler once asked, “WHY?”

Unfortunately in this case the standard answer, “Because I said so,” doesn’t really apply. So instead, I will tell you that the answer to that “Why?” is, rather ironically, so that you can understand the “why”. And once you have a sense of the “why,” you can proceed to make informed workforce decisions with predictable outcomes.

This is where the Zen part comes in.

Once you allow your decisions to be driven by analytics, you have the ability to see trends exactly as they are, not filtered through any preconceived notions. Gone are the decisions made by gut instinct, based on assumptions that may or (worse) may not be true. No longer do you have to perform the connect-the-dots headstand to make sense of a pile of metrics in a spreadsheet. Instead, let Aquire’s newest offering, InSight™ serve up actionable information to drive your workforce planning initiatives.

For example, you might see from your metrics that turnover in a particular division is 30% higher than last year. Okay. Good information to know. But what do you gain from that figure on its own? Not much. Fire up InSight and invite Hierarchy-Driven Analytics to the table, though, and you can dig down into that division to investigate “why” that figure has changed so significantly – a new manager? a new process? a change in direction? Know the “why” and you can address the situation wisely. In addition, InSight correlates results to specific business initiatives with visual timelines and then shows you the graphical trends that result.

Once the burden is off of you to try and interpret the cause of an effect based on assumptions, instincts or pure guesswork, you’ll clear away the confusion and achieve your Zen state. So have faith in analytics. Accept their truths. And let them point the way to productive, proactive, enlightened planning. Are you ready to achieve your Zen?

Aquire’s newest offering, InSight, is being announced at HR Tech. If you’re ready to achieve enlightenment with the most highly-focused analytics available, beat a path to booth #641 for a demo of the only hierarchy-driven workforce analytics solution on the market. Those of you not attending the show, email sales@aquire.com for more information.

Cheers,
Lois