IT Services and HR staff help to create a culture of collaboration by working together, and alongside external consultants, to successfully deliver new HR Portal functionality.
The HR Portal is essential to providing HR services efficiently. Quite simply, it is the single online destination where University staff have their HR needs met. Creating a portal that meets these high demands is no easy task! However, IT Services and HR staff pulled together to deliver new functionality to the portal, significantly improving the way staff raise and manage their queries with HR.
The HR Portal project was extremely challenging – mainly due to tight timescales and limited resources. In order to ensure the successful delivery of the project, the newly formed IT Services and HR project team invited an external consultancy firm ESM Engage, to assist in the delivery process. ESM Engage are experts in ServiceNow, the software which currently delivers the IT Service Desk Gateway, and the HR Service Portal. This is the first time an external agency has helped to complete ServiceNow development — simply because we have very experienced in-house developers already! However, it was imperative that resources were kept at a certain level to reduce the risks to services.
This is a great example of internal teams — with an excellent understanding of existing University platforms – collaborating with experts from a technical consultancy, and pulling temporary resources from a flexible resource pool. This approach has enabled the team to deliver the project on time, reduce the risk to our existing ServiceNow systems, and continue business as usual system enhancements. Bruce Pearson, Head of Applications Services
During the initial stages of the project, the team attended a number of ESM Engage workshops to ensure the new HR portal functionality met with HR requirements. ESM also worked alongside our existing ServiceNow implementation. Seven weeks of configuration followed with various teams providing input and advice, and following exhaustive user acceptance testing. The team really benefited from working alongside ESM, and had nothing but positive feedback.
Our experience working with engage ESM has been very good. Although we had very challenging time scales, the relationship and approach developed between the lead developer and our HR project lead was very positive, pragmatic and constructive to ensure the project went off without any major issues. The end to end continuity through requirements gathering, build, implementation, hand over and training was very professional and has left the team feeling it has been a very positive experience. Although we were challenging regarding our requirements, the consultant was very realistic in relation to what could be achieved, they managed expectations well and ensured we remained focused on the key requirements within the scope of the project. Very good, I would work with ESM again. John Dicken, Assistant Director of HR (Service Delivery)
We are pleased to announce that the new HR Portal went live on Tuesday 02 May and has been a great success! This positive result is due to all the hard work and dedication from the project team, internal ServiceNow developers, and our implementation partner – ESM Engage.
Well done to all those involved!