04:05 GLOBAL
Diary of an HR Manager
grounds. The other three would join two other software suites on our long list for demonstration. We had to fix possible dates for this, and we decided to assign two days in the second week of January to do this, giving the vendors plenty of notice, and for Sarah and I to script the sessions with what we needed to have demonstrated and build the scoring matrices. We also drew up a draft list of who should attend the demonstrations. I volunteered to contact the vendors, and Sarah to produce the attendee invites once the dates and times were confirmed. There’s a lot to consider in these demonstrations; I like the first round to take no more than two and a half hours which would give us time for a general intro of 15 minutes, a final Q&A of around 20 minutes and time to
cover 8 key scenarios. It’s intense as all attending would be marking scores throughout on their points of interest. A light and well-ventilated room was essential, so we opted to use the boardroom. 12.35 pm We finished up our summary and added in some rough costings, and I went back to my office to write to the vendors, both those selected for the next round and those we had decided not to take forward. 2.10 pm A quick meeting with the leader of the Events committee, a group we had formed shortly after I joined, and was elected every year. All internal events were run by them, and the committee members received a one-off payment every year in recognition of their services.
Friday 10.00 am Sarah, Head of Payroll, and I sat down in a meeting room to compare our notes from the previous day’s exhibition visit. It had been full-on from the moment we entered just before 9.00 am, but we had managed to see our five vendors and spend time going over our questions on various scenarios that we needed to know. We had our score sheets and observations on each, and so we added them together to see which possibles emerged. One we could discount straight away, as it wouldn’t be easily configurable for our flexible working arrangements, and on another Sarah had a question mark over the payroll module on security
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GLOBAL PAYROLL MAGAZINE ISSUE 8
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