We had the opportunity and privilege to work alongside a software house dedicated to a specific sector, to help it define how to evolve the features of its management platform with respect to the Modules dedicated to HR processes of Organizational Development (performance management, training, skills mapping and analysis, strategic workforce planning), adopting an approach that puts the user, his experience and needs at the center, starting from the initial phase of listening and defining requirements.
The user-centric approach prioritises user needs when defining requirements for the HR Platform. These requirements are then translated into functional and, later, technical requirements to direct the development roadmap.
This was the element of design innovation for our client software house, which until then had been accustomed to proposing developments designed directly by developers but sometimes far removed from user needs.
The challenges of the project
The first challenge concerned the software house’s target market, which consists of public and private entities looking for effective HR solutions where collaboration and competitiveness coexist:
- make use of the software house’s offerings, from a “captive” perspective and thus with economic advantages, with solutions designed specifically for their needs and availing themselves of the benefit of practice sharing with other entities,
- buy solutions from the market, at a higher expense, buying nonspecific solutions, but tapping into advanced products and highly competitive service/release levels.
The second challenge concerns the ability (or rather the competence) of the software house team to “listen” to customers and their requirements in an open manner without putting technological “constraints” and feasibility ahead of listening. Thus, the listening phase must be clearly distinguished from the processing phase, and requirements must be defined with a view to feasibility, priorities, etc.
The third challenge concerns the “vertical” expertise of the software house team on the processes covered by the project, namely HR processes of Organizational Development (performance management, training, skills mapping and analysis, strategic workforce planning).
In fact, the team is composed of people who are knowledgeable about the technology, the customers’ target industry, but are not specialists in in-scope processes.
The methodological approach of the project
The project was defined around two key objectives:
- structured listening to customers to improve the HR Platform from an Organizational Development perspective, declining them into functional requirements that were subsequently translated into feasibility and priorities and generated a release roadmap communicated and validated by the customers themselves
- Transfer to the team listening skills and ways of listening, and vertical expertise on in-scope processes.
A work plan was then set up that included:
- Strategic Steering Workshop with client apex figures to address priorities and guidelines (duration: 2 hours/mode: remote)
- Focus groups with customer contacts, (more technical profiles such as process and/or function managers) to gather operational requirements (duration: 3.5 hours, mode: remote, 7 focus groups per project scope)
- Drafting a comprehensive functional requirements document
- Finalization and review of the development roadmap and releases with the technical team
- Validation workshop with client senior figures to share roadmap
- Retrospective to consolidate learning, in light of an entire project managed by 4 hands between the HRI team and the software house team.
The workshops and focus groups were run remotely to facilitate the participation of clients spread throughout the country.
The facilitation of the focus groups was enriched by the proposition of “benchmarking” insights from the solutions proposed by the private market as well, in order to assess on a case-by-case basis how well they could or could not be applied to the context specificity of the sector in which the clients operate.
Likewise, the graphical representation of the processes in the perimeter, and the visual map of the interconnections between the processes, helped facilitation, bringing out needs and “requirements” that would otherwise have remained unexpressed, related precisely to the possibility of making use of data already in the system (in whole or in part) because they are connected to other processes.
The Miro platform enabled process maps to be developed and co-constructed and facilitated discussion and listening sessions.
The workshops and focus groups were facilitated by senior profiles, domain experts (i.e., connoisseurs of perimeter processes, the main solutions on the market but also of software solution design methodology) with group facilitation skills (designing facilitated listening sessions, managing group dynamics, active listening and reframing, session time management, etc.).
It was a challenging time to hand over and transfer skills, but it happily coincided with an internal reorganization within the software house that differentiated the roles of Requirement manager, focused on actively listening to customers to gather needs and define functional requirements, from the role of Development, understanding that – while they must work closely together – they are roles that require profoundly different soft skills, technical competencies and attitudes.
How did it turn out?
The Organizational Development and HR Platform evolution project was highly appreciated first and foremost by the software house’s customers, who felt that they were listened to in an open and effective manner.
The software house teams themselves also achieved the project outcome within the defined timeframe, but more importantly expanded their skills to be able to independently lead active customer listening sessions for future projects.
And the collaboration continues, in a world like technology full of new challenges … AI first and foremost.
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