Buying and implementing new software for your organisation can be a daunting task. When you couple it with the fact that the new software will be responsible for critical organisational processes such as providing payroll services as well as offering human capital management solution, often with increased employee adoption of human resources (HR) tasks – you want to make sure you do it right the first time.
To assist you with approaching this task – we have prepared a list of essential questions you need to ask yourself to achieve the best outcome for your organisation. The questions are split into two sections – one, the things you require to know about the project from within your organisation, and two, the things you need to find out from the software vendor.
From the perspective of your own organisation you need to know the driving factors for buying and implementing a new HR/Payroll system, e.g. the initial driver for a new solution might be that one, or many, requirements are not being met. Once you have established that new software is required, the next step is to ask what outcomes you would like to see achieved; in other words, what are the objectives for acquiring a new system. Following from that consider individual departments and overall organisation goals to ensure that they and your objectives are aligned. Finally determine the project constraints – budget and timeframe to allow for a successful change management process.
As for the questions to ask a software vendor – and taking into account that your organisation no doubt have other software solutions in place – you need to ensure that their product is fully integrated. This means the system has an open architecture and allows integrating with third party products. Subsequently, ascertain that the vendor has proper information security management processes and that they provide backup recovery plans. Furthermore establish if the software is scalable to cater for organisational growth; and if the system has a mobile solution to allow staff adoption of key HR tasks. To complete the task confirm where the data is stored, and where the support centre and account management is located. Finally don’t forget to ask the vendor to provide evidence of working with and understanding the requirements particular to government.
*Copy supplied by Frontier Software Pty Ltd
