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ISSUE 4
Over and above these moments, a key to a successful payroll migration project is – alas – expectations management. Leadership needs to be informed that in most cases some things will go wrong and will need to be resolved. Employees should be made aware of the system change in advance and informed of any potential impact. A 3-month stabilization period after going live is a reasonable timeframe, but this can extend to 4 or 6 months in particularly complex organizations. Leadership should be prepared to manage communications to all stakeholders involved during that period. Q: What crucial mistakes do you think organisations make when searching for a payroll provider and do you have any advice to make that hunt easier? L: This is a tricky question! The mistakes I’ve seen most frequently are: Assuming your payroll provider is just a supplier of commodity goods: while the payroll market has become highly commoditised and from a “Payroll is not a linear, mech process in which each input causal relationship to a singl output. It is more similar to boiling a potion than hammering out pay slips in a manufacturing chain.”
who may be close to (or beyond retirement). Most times, reverse engineering the existing payroll system to derive these rules is not an option. Whenever an organization is moving away from an obsolete system of which it has little knowledge and documentation, the functional design phase really requires time and effort that cannot be compressed. The other side of this is that once the migration is done, it really is wise for functional specification documents to be updated and maintained during the lifecycle of the new system. 2. Data migration: Companies should do their best to engage existing systems providers to cooperate in the data migration project. Every system has its own database structure and data semantics, and data is almost never available exactly in the format required by the new system. A data migration workstream needs to be set up to ensure that the rules for data migration are agreed and signed off by all parties involved. 3. Service transition: payroll staff need to have the time and resources to learn to use the new system. This isn’t just about getting around menus and functions. It means testing the process through a series of parallel runs, which can be limited to sample populations but should be chosen over multiple months to provide a test of as many relevant cases as possible.
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