A Healthy Result

Continued

Running a Tight Ship

O'Connell got involved with ESR in 2001 when he moved from a local to a national HR job; he took over as programme director in January 2003. O'Connell is the first to admit that he was a bit of a control freak, especially in the early days when the project went through rough times. "By the time we got the ESR solution to a point that it would work, we had zero tolerance for the types of things that we probably would have been more tolerant of otherwise," he says. "I have zero tolerance under any circumstances for what I consider to be poor performance, and I think this turned out to be an incredibly well-managed, well-controlled project."

Each wave began with a call to each of the trusts 14 months prior to the go-live date to find out what systems they were using and learn about any peculiarities in their data that would affect how ESR functioned. At month 11, they entered a three-month prerequisite stage, during which each payroll group set up its own implementation governance structure, complete with a project board and manager, and prepared a project initiation document detailing its implementation process. At the end of the three months, O'Connell's implementation team completed a readiness assessment. If there were issues yet to resolve, the trust got an amber light. When everything was in order, they got a green light. They never had to issue a red light at that stage, O'Connell notes, adding that his team did a thorough job of selling the benefits of ESR before and during each wave.

At month eight, a three-month hard implementation period began, starting with any local build required by idiosyncrasies in the trust's data configuration and ending with an overlay of the larger ESR template. The final five months were spent in two testing cycles. Data was cleansed to ensure a smooth automated migration.

"It was a relatively heavy-handed implementation in the sense that we had a very tight project timeline with clear deliverables," says O'Connell. "We were very clear in terms of what we were going to do and what we expected the local trusts to do. We had a rapid recovery team in place, and we made it clear we would take no nonsense, that we will stand over the implementation if we have to. We didn't do that for everyone, of course, because we wanted the local trusts to pull the solution into their organizations for themselves. Our attitude was born out of the difficult times early on, and I believe our rollout methodology was very, very sound."