A Fantastic Kronos Interview Question
A prospective client, with whom we recently interviewed, asked us a direct but rather broad question. “How are you with implementing Kronos ‘Best Practices’? This is a fantastic question within a question if you think about it. Just as one could debate what practices in Workforce Management (WFM) have truly been shown to be best, how does one measure the implementation side of the equation? Would best practices that were partially implemented and adopted be better than merely good ones that were seamlessly rolled out and embraced? Again, we weren’t asked what we thought were best practices or if we could show them to his organization; he asked how good we were we at implementing them.
Are we Implementing Kronos Best Practices?
Of course what he was really after was a company that could help re-implement their Kronos Timekeeping environment. We almost never get to start a project when the page is totally blank. (We're known as the troubleshooters. The team that can take a failing project and drive it to success. This isn't what companies look for when starting a fresh implementation!) In this regard one is tempted to ask the client “Have you not implemented best practices up to now because you were not aware of them or because your organization has some aversion to doing things in the best way possible?” We find most will admit to some of both.
During our research for an upcoming white paper on Kronos and business process outsourcing (BPO) we soon realized that both conditions had to be present for a company to even look at outsourcing a major organ like Human Resources. That is to say, “We don’t know what best is and even if we did we couldn’t implement it and/or run it ourselves”. One might throw in “as cost-effectively as Xerox, or ADP or whomever” but that is almost always a matter of context. What metrics are you using and with whom are you comparing yourself? Certainly going with a brand name company as your outsourcing partner gives you best practice plausibility but I believe it is the Implementing aspect organizations hunger for most. Can you actually get it done in this place?!?.
Of course that’s not what BPO companies aim to do. They are going to do it at their place. They are just going to do it with your employees in addition to all the employees from dozens if not hundreds of other companies. They don’t have to change your organization they simply have to absorb it.
At Improvizations we see a lot of bad practices in good and even great organizations. Getting them to improve and/or adopt better practices as we help with the nuts and bolts of implementing software is really our primary job and our only practice.
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