An Oscar for our HRIT team

Sunday, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Science gave it's most prestigious award to it's members, the Oscar. It must be an incredible feeling of accomplishment to win this award.

This past week, I felt this same feeling of accomplishment when we went live with an online Compensation Tool for Merit Increase Processing. At OfficeMax (my employer) this was a big deal, as they had been using Excel spreadsheets prior to this year and it was a time consuming process wrought with error.

We use SAP as our HRMS, and decided to use their Compensation Module for support of our process. We had a rough start as we had difficulty obtaining the training needed, and our initial consulting partner was not as knowledgeable as we thought. We were 3 months from go live and not even in Unit Test yet!

After finding the right consulting resource the team pushed forward. What started off as a "no customization" initiative resulted in requiring customizations as the delivered process did not work as we needed it to. The project was going red, and we had to make some adjustments. Working with our Compensation team, we revised the plan and pushed the rollout date by 7 days.

Complications occurred 2 weeks before go-live when we were informed there was to be a complete refresh of our QA environment.

With a lot of hard work, we went live on February 22. The system has been live only 4 working days and already 35% of increases have been processed in the application.

The response has been incredibly positive and our executive team is thrilled that they do not have to work the spreadsheets this year.

While I don't have an Oscar to give to the team, they will get an Award. However more important than a trophy is the satisfaction of knowing that our entire company is benefiting from our work. When we hear people talk about how easy it is to process merit increases this year we can smile and proudly say, "I am so glad you like it, I helped implement it."

Do you have similar "Oscar Winning" stories to share?