Investing in People IMF HR Web

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1 Investing in People IMF HR Web Peggy Schoen, Laurie Husak, Tracy Lyall, Smitha Raju, Erik Churchill, Steve Clements, John Cass / International Monetary Fund / Washington, D.C. NEED/OPPORTUNITY Multiple internal surveys and analyses conducted between 2003 and 2006 documented IMF staff s frustration with the web presence of the human resources department (HRD). HR transactions and the information supporting them were spread over multiple applications, websites and documents, with some maintained by other departments. Many processes were still manual, and content was being distributed in hard copy or through external sites to audiences without intranet access. As complexity, duplication and inconsistency increased, so did the HR workload. Several attempts were made to address the problem. While each made small improvements, all were attempted in isolation and generally did not put the end user experience at the center of the process. By late 2008, the situation changed dramatically, creating a unique opportunity to completely redefine the HR web presence. IT had implemented Microsoft SharePoint as an enterprise platform and moved forward on a new intranet design. The major success of an HR website 1 developed for the downsizing had demonstrated the functionality of SharePoint and the viability of maintaining policy content on the Web. It showed the value of communication input early in the development process and proved that an enhanced web presence could greatly improve the HR department s credibility. HRD had initiated a major human capital management (HCM) project in 2007 in cooperation with the finance and technology & general services departments. The project aimed to overhaul HR policies, processes and systems over a 30-month time frame, but its momentum and scope accelerated after the downsizing in early HCM made funding and expertise available for web development, tied it to key business goals and gave it high-level sponsorship. Finally, resources were added in mid-2008 to handle daily communication operations so that the HR communication officer could focus full-time on the Web. GOALS, OBJECTIVES AND DELIVERABLES With funding in hand, the team set about defining the major goals of the new HR Web: Provide a single sign-on common user interface for HR policy, news, data and processes. Improve the quality and usability of HR information on the Web. Reduce HR and finance administrative workload by improving online self-service functionality. Support portal access for the complete employee life cycle from prior to entry-on-duty through separation. To achieve these goals, tactical objectives and deliverables were defined under the following areas: 1 A post-downsizing survey showed that the success of the Exploring Your Options communication program and website significantly improved employees perceptions of both HRD and Fund management.

2 USABILITY AND DESIGN Use consistent, simple and best-practice web design. Develop a new recognizable brand for IMF HR. Design navigation based on the user s perspective but scalable to 3,000+ pages. Keep the main IMF intranet navigation accessible at all times. Provide an integrated view of personal transactions and general policy. Present personal information in an easy-to-review dashboard view. Use process wizards (rather than explanatory steps) for transactions. WEB CONTENT MANAGEMENT Reduce manual content administration, duplication and potential error. Build a single source content repository in SharePoint. Simplify content. Develop a metadata indexing strategy to support multiple views and audiences. Support decentralized content management with a built-in workflow. HR TRANSACTIONS Streamline the collection, validation and availability of personal information. Reduce manual processing and handling of the same data multiple times. Allow for real-time data validation and transactions where needed. Allow staging of data when required. Maintain the integrity of the existing rules base within PeopleSoft. AUDIENCES AND STAKEHOLDERS ACTIVE EMPLOYEES Two-thirds of IMF employees are non-u.s. nationals who have relocated to the U.S. on a G-4 visa for employees of international organizations. Most are based in Washington, D.C., but the Fund has about 400 staff outside the U.S. and a limited number on sabbatical or external assignments. An employee s benefits eligibility depends on a combination of factors, including category of employment, visa and taxpayer status, hire location, duty station, part-/full-time work status, and marital status. The team knew what employees didn t like about the current Web from previous surveys and research done by the HCM project. Experience from the downsizing and a pilot project confirmed that they did like the approach of structuring content by scenarios, events and concerns. NEW HIRES (PRIOR TO ENTRY-ON-DUTY) IMF employees are often hired from outside the U.S. several months prior to entry-on-duty. During the interim, they must obtain visas and make arrangements for an international move. To supplement the anecdotal information about new hire concerns provided by HR staff, the team assembled a focus group of employees who had worked for the IMF less than three months and a group of the HR generalists responsible for orienting new staff. Their feedback drove the design of the HR Web s on-boarding portal and led to several enhancements to the recruiting section of IMF.org.

3 FAMILIES, SEPARATING STAFF AND RETIREES The spouses of international organization employees have the challenge of acclimating the family to a new country. Since eligible dependents of G4 employees may also work in the U.S., they are eager to learn about the local job market and the Fund s job search assistance services. Separating staff are eligible to receive relocation benefits after they have left the Fund. IMF retirees receive a pension from the Fund and participate in health, life and long-term care insurance plans. Many will apply for U.S. permanent residency and are interested in some of the same information provided to employees. What all of these groups have in common is that they do not have access to the IMF intranet, so information was provided to them in hard copy or on external websites that duplicated intranet content. OTHER MAJOR STAKEHOLDERS In addition to the audiences above, stakeholders included: All HR department staff and contracted service providers. HR managers and assistants in operational departments. Staff in finance and transportation whose work interfaces with HR processes. The HCM project steering committee. Teams in the transportation & general services department (TGS) responsible for enterprise architecture, application development, web design, SharePoint deployment, remote access and information architecture. The HR liaison in the legal department. The web team was able to leverage stakeholder analysis and communication channels put in place for the main HCM project. Most important, representatives from these groups were included in the as-is/to-be process evaluations to make sure that the new processes met their requirements. SOLUTION OVERVIEW SHAREPOINT/.NET The team selected Microsoft SharePoint as the user interface and content management application. The plan was to develop a new visual identity for HR based on the Fund s new intranet design, and then start building isolated parts of the new Web in SharePoint that would have the biggest impact on the department s workload. Work had already begun in early 2008 on a redesign of the education allowance application, as it was the most time-consuming benefit for the HR center to process. The pilot project taught the team several important lessons. SharePoint worked well for publishing content and for housing the documents uploaded by benefit applicants. However, the functionality in InfoPath, Microsoft s tool for building online forms, was not robust enough to support complex transaction logic, nor was the Fund s SharePoint environment configured to support the load from data transactions. The team solved this problem by building transactions in.net pages mirroring the SharePoint design so users never knew they had left SharePoint or experienced slow responses.

4 MEGA MENU NAVIGATION The pilot project also demonstrated that the Fund s new intranet design, which used a left vertical navigation, was not suited to a site that must accommodate online transaction wizards and contained large amounts of content. Working with a web designer experienced in designing online transactions, the team proposed a top mega menu design that allows users to see large groupings of content at one time without taking up the valuable real estate needed for transaction wizards and personal data dashboards. Getting acceptance for this change internally was a challenge, but the team built their case by showing the gain in available real estate on the page and enlisting best practice advice from outside experts through LinkedIn Answers. Users responded very positively to the new design (Microsoft is taking the same approach with SharePoint). PORTALS TO SUPPORT FULL EMPLOYEE LIFE CYCLE The Web needed to support the full employee life cycle, so that employees can transition in and out of the organization easily. The team accomplished this by setting up a standard method for accessing the HR Web from outside the firewall, indexing content for these groups and identifying the HR transactions that would apply to pre- and post-employment settings. Prior to the launch of the on-boarding portal in May 2010, new hires would receive a 40+ page instructional document along with 10 or more paper forms on their first day. Now, new hires can access a variety of information online to help them with their family s relocation, enter personal information, learn about and prepare for benefits elections, questions, and submit scanned documents before they leave their home country. In January 2011, a companion off-boarding portal was launched. Portals for retirees and spouses were planned for launch in AS-IS / TO-BE PROCESS ANALYSIS With the help of business process analysts, the team mapped each HR process from the time an employee was hired through his/her separation or retirement, creating an as-is and a to-be map. The goal was to eliminate paper forms, enable employees to enter and maintain everything themselves, eliminate data redundancy, streamline processing and form the basis for the design of the transaction page. This work identified necessary policy changes to simplify processes, led to more user-friendly design and reduced the need for explanatory content. PERSONAL VS. GENERAL The previous employee kiosk based on Authoria was designed to serve up benefits policy content based on eligibility. In the personalized view, you could only read policies for the benefits for which you were eligible, so you couldn t easily see what would apply if one or more of your eligibility criteria changed in the future. The new Web does not filter access to benefits policy by eligibility. Instead, personal eligibility and information is displayed on a single dashboard, while general eligibility under a variety of scenarios can be referenced in easy-to-view tables. CONTENT MATRIX AND METADATA SharePoint provides rich functionality for defining relationships between pages of content, enabling content to be displayed in multiple views automatically and to be more easily maintained. But this requires planning to ensure that publishing templates are built to provide the necessary metadata. The team created a comprehensive topical matrix to supplement the traditional site map. They reviewed the entire matrix with content providers and asked the

5 Fund s information architects to test the main categories with users. The matrix defined the relationship between content sections and classifications, such as visa status, category of employment, duty station, taxpayer status, life event and career event. This matrix provided the blueprint for designers, developers and content creators. Now that the system is in production, these fields make it easy to generate and maintain sets of related links, identify content for updating after a policy change, and create search indexes. ME VS. WE One of the most unpopular aspects of the previous HR website, HR Connect, was its complex navigation, which grouped information into a complex topical hierarchy that covered everything from individual benefits to the HR department s major initiatives. The new Web separates the Me content that impacts an employee s life and career from the We content such as workplace rules. FAQ BLOG Another lesson learned with the downsizing website was that SharePoint s out-of-the-box blog works well for publishing FAQs. Each question is a blog post tagged to one or more category. Categories can be created at any time, and questions from a particular category can be pulled onto a content page. IMPLEMENTATION AND CHALLENGES DELIVERABLE TIME LINE New brand launch: February 2009 Web presence kickoff: August 2009 Process analysis: August 2009 February 2010 Design and templates completed: March 2010 Onboarding portal launch: 1 May 2010 Active employee portal release no. 1: 16 June 2010 Active employee portal release no. 2: 16 December 2010 Off-boarding portal launch: January 2011 Family and retiree portals: April 2012 BUDGET The HR Web budget reflects an investment in HR transaction development (automation of manual processes) that goes well beyond a normal communication web project. The largest portion of the project s US$3.1 million cost was used for the process analysis (US$470,000); transaction design, development and testing (US$1.4 million); and IT project management (US$1 million). Roughly US$100,000 was spent on user interface design, with an additional US$95,000 required for SharePoint architecture expertise. The Fund already had a full enterprise license for SharePoint, and internal resources were used for content development and publishing. The project met all major deliverable milestones and came in approximately US$300,000 under budget. CHALLENGES Challenges have been discussed under each solution.

6 MEASUREMENT AND EVALUATION The new HR web delivered on all four of the major goals. First and foremost, it laid the new foundation for multiple deliverables in the human capital management (HCM) project, which are targeted to produce an estimated annual savings of 6.7 full-time equivalents equal to 13,400 hours or US$1,192,600 per year when completed. The new design in SharePoint reduced the number of HR Web and system user interfaces from 10 to one, delivering not only a significant reduction in user frustration and time usage, but also major maintenance savings for IT and HR. The IMF HR design was also cited as best practice by the SharePoint Best Practice conference. HR content was streamlined from over 5,000 pages to 1,400. Anecdotal feedback on the simplicity and usability of the new pages has been overwhelmingly positive. A survey of HR web users is scheduled for mid-2011 after the remaining new HCM applications come online. However, the team already knows that the average hits on the new home page average 4,000 per week, which is nearly double the usage of the old HR web site. On the transaction front, the impact has been major. The two phases of the new Web have added 10 new automated transactions and redesigned 15 others. Since the new Web launch, 3,200 applications and certifications for education allowance and home leave benefits have been submitted online. Payment processing now takes three to four days instead of three to four weeks, and workload savings have been documented in both HR and finance. Over 600 enrollments/updates for direct deposit have been made online, a process which was previously done by paper. The new Web also implemented an e-filing application, which dramatically reduces the amount of documents being scanned into employee files. To date, nearly 8,000 HR transaction support documents have been e-filed with the new web technology. With the launch of on-boarding and off-boarding portals, the Web now serves the employee life cycle from hire to separation date. Thus far, 205 new hires have logged on to the on-boarding portal in advance of their arrival at the Fund, greatly reducing the workload on the recruiting staff. Portals for the remaining audiences, spouses and retirees, were slated for implementation in 2011.