Payroll transformation projects stem from your company’s strategic direction and often aim at elevating payroll operational delivery or overcoming operational challenges. As global payroll leaders, we must define the desired (and often idealistic) end-state and, through this, clarify the key project principles. This is the most fundamental component determining your success, as well as prioritizing your work.
Embedding these key principles into your plan and including listening sessions to understand pain-points with key stakeholders will help drive meaningful innovation, overcome resistance to change, increase engagement, and showcase the value across your company.
In academia, project design papers tend to focus on comparing agile and waterfall project management methodologies, differentiating the approach, flexibility, and methods of engagement. While selecting appropriate methodology is the backbone of defining the structure of any large project, the question of what supplementary considerations are relevant to payroll projects remains an open question.
In practice, for example, if your payroll department’s focus is on enhancing payroll data security, it may be useful to outline checkpoints for building a secure file transfer protocol, deploying a multi-factor authentication solution for an employee self-service portal, or reviewing your data breach incident reporting procedure.
If your priority is securing business continuity, your deliverables may focus on limiting key-person dependencies through training and standard operating procedure production or perhaps developing an automated direct salary disbursement solution or deploying an automatic data feed interface to your payroll system.
The intent of this article is to shine a light on those important areas that support successful global payroll project designs of any scale or size.
Building for the Future
Building sustainable and scalable payroll solutions that are agile should be the foremost consideration of each plan. Your processes and systems should relate to your payroll governance design and be embedded into your organizational model.
Payroll projects tend to last several months, so it’s critical to assess the current and “as is” landscape of your payroll plan. Consider the vision of your “to be” or the future state of how it will look like after the go-live and beyond, whether it is three, six, or 12 months post-launch.
It is of great value to outline and reassess your principles directly linked to deliverables throughout the entire lifecycle of the project. Consulting vested stakeholders will help you to adapt to any challenges that arise, shifts in priority, and ensure the strived for outcomes still meets their requirements.
While spending weeks on a one-off exercise of standardizing nominal codes may be useful, if it is not brought into a larger strategic perspective, it may be misunderstood. The result is that your solution will not be maintained in the long run. I recommend adapting the mindset of reassessing and spotlighting significant value.
Evaluate Future Change
It is useful to gather information in the following areas to evaluate whether the plans are sufficiently adaptable:
- What are the known future legislative changes?
- What are the upcoming internal changes—including any company policy roll outs, new benefit offerings, structural changes at the organization?
- What is the fit to the wider global, regional, cluster model?
- What is the expected change for the respective population’s headcount and staffing of supporting teams?
- What will happen during times of significant growth or headcount reduction?
- What other projects and innovative solutions are lined up and what downstream impact will they have?
- What is the impact of the full payroll cycle such as tax and holiday year-end, bonus payroll, benefit enrollment windows, 13th or 14th month payroll?
Ensuring these discussions are held early on will help reduce additional unforeseen costs for system developments, resulting from a sudden process “patchwork” for unexpected challenges. Additionally, it will support key stakeholder alignment.
Post go live, when monitoring for success and assessment of solution sustainability, it is beneficial to implement both quantitative and declarative temporary key performance controls to test the quality of the solution. These controls may range from pulse surveys, budget spend, errors generated, and processing time to late filings, just to name a few.
Always Focusing on the Larger Perspective
Global payroll does not exist in a vacuum. When designing projects, it is important to arm oneself with subject matter experts (SMEs) across HR, information technology (IT), information security, finance, legal, procurement, benefits, and talent acquisition as key advisors.
Ensuring availability of appropriate people resources through planning suitable timelines, mapping out workstreams, and communication channels is critical. For larger projects, raising temporary governance teams to support swift decision making and support risk management is beneficial.
Deep Dive Discovery
When going through deep-dive discovery and design sessions, your focus on end-to-end processes as well as sub-process impact to support cross-functional teams can truly revolutionize the ways we work.
For example, you may determine that employees’ bank account details should flow from your human capital management (HCM) system into payroll. If you limit your focus only to input and outputs to achieve this, you will simply update your HCM system to ensure data is present in a compatible format, test the data feed, and ensure appropriate payroll reports are in place to validate this information.
However, if you take your time to review the wider process, you may benefit from linking this data feed further to expenses and other portals enhancing the employee experience or lift manual paperwork done by your talent acquisition team to source the initial information for a new hire through creating a digital questionnaire.
Leveraging the experience of your payroll vendors and external partners through discussing best practices and standard solutions implemented in other serviced companies also is a good idea. It is also worth it to continuously challenge yourself by asking how unique your payroll truly is.
If your global payroll team is storing dozens of custom-built post-payroll reports, which are not a result of audit needs and provide limited added value across your organization, perhaps there is an opportunity to reduce work. Overengineered company payroll processes tend to be inherited to a point where they no longer serve the purpose they once did. There is beauty in simplicity, and we should never shy away from challenging the status quo.
Measuring Success Using Well-Defined Targets
Finally, it can be argued that success can only be measured if targets are well defined and appropriate controls are in place. The success of global payroll projects can be amplified through tying in strategic relevance, a future-proof build, and a big picture mindset. Focusing on sustainability and agility, while continuously benchmarking and seeking greater organizational improvements, will elevate your global payroll projects.