A Healthy Result
Continued
Firsthand View
With the final rollout that began last February, O'Connell relinquished command as ESR programme director and is now director of Workforce and Organisation Development for NHS South Central. Ironically, he's now working in the region undergoing the final wave of implementation, and he sees firsthand the impact of ESR. "When I came to South Central, I got pressure to get numbers on how some of our organizational restructuring was impacting staffing numbers," he explains. "I couldn't get consistently accurate numbers, and then I realized that the accurate numbers were coming from the areas where ESR was already implemented, and I was having trouble with areas where they were still in the process of implementing it. ESR was the differentiating factor."
While O'Connell sees vast benefits from the record-keeping capabilities of ESR, he's frustrated that more users aren't taking advantage of advanced functions such as talent management and learning management, which have the potential to dramatically expand workforce development capacity. "If I have one regret, it's that we didn't get more people live on that richer functionality from Day One," he says. "It's the general concern I have about IT implementations, that we have these fantastic systems developed with a lot of wonderful functionality, and we still only use something like 35 percent of it immediately postimplementation. We're probably three years out from full functionality. In retrospect, I would have had a bigger implementation team that would really drive out the benefits. We're doing some of that with ESR, but it's as if the benefits implementation team is always a bit of the poor relation. It's never quite as huge as the team that goes in to get the system embedded and live in the first few months.
"Still, people take real pride in the fact that ESR is the largest HR-payroll system in the world and that they did such a good job on it. That's one thing I've taken with me outside the project arena, the ability to engender the same level of focus and energy that we've had on this project."
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Molly Rose Teuke is a freelance writer specializing in business and technology.
