Hays Specialist Recruitment implemented a successful Selective Adoption strategy

Summary

Hays Specialist Recruitment is recognized for implementing a successful Selective Adoption strategy with the support of the PeopleSoft Test Framework (PTF), which drives significant savings in test effort and duration. For example, user acceptance testing of PO Tracking previously done by two experienced subject matter experts over two days, is now automated to run in 8 – 10 hours.

Hays Specialist Recruitment has continued its Selective Adoption journey with the rollout of an in-house continuous delivery model, leveraging automated update scripting, a monthly technical update of PeopleTools and related tech stack components, a customization catalog and review process, and an orchestrated strategy to regularly deploy functional updates.

This robust process has been used to deliver significant value to users, including widespread rollout of fluid features and self-service for employees and managers for critical HCM capabilities such as absence management and payroll, diversity reporting, and expense reporting, as well as approvals.

Customer comments

Background

Hays Specialist Recruitment is a global specialist staffing company that commenced its PeopleSoft journey back in 2008. Hays has a complex heavily customized PeopleSoft suite with 16 modules across the four pillars of Finance, HCM, CRM and ELM. In 2015, Hays successfully completed an upgrade to PeopleSoft 9.2 and subsequently implemented a Selective Adoption and PeopleSoft Test Framework strategy to keep their suite up to date.

Hays introduced a collaborative business/IT “Model Office” initiative to provide a platform for delivering real business benefits utilizing the capabilities of PeopleSoft 9.2.

Selective Adoption – The Hays continuous delivery model

Following the Hays upgrade to 9.2 in 2015, a program of “Keeping PeopleSoft Current” was introduced. This program sees a full catch-up of PeopleSoft images and PeopleTools versions. Due to intrusive and not modern customizations, each of our Keep Current programs results in a significant exercise to reapply the customizations. The downside is that less time is spent by the PeopleSoft functional and development teams on adding value and too much time on “stand still” updates and testing. To mitigate these impacts, our program includes a review of the customization catalog within each cycle with the aim to isolate and replace additional customizations each time.

Infrastructure

For the infrastructure element of the program, Hays has implemented:

Automated update scripting
Monthly technical release program – driving dot releases of PeopleTools as well as updates to WebLogic, Tuxedo, and Java

Technical

To drive agility and reduce the long-term cost of ownership, Hays created their own customization catalog and undertook a technical review of customizations. This will be an iterative process that will continue for each update. For each customization, an assessment is made which challenges how the customization/business request would be handled today: Bolt on?, Configuration tool?, Workflow/process change?, Or indeed whether a different tool could be used?.

The result of the analysis allows the team to isolate and replace existing customizations, which has significantly simplified the process of upgrading PeopleTools:

Functional

This overarching plan ensures that the functional team can deliver continuous improvement using new features when they are made available by Oracle. The team can use the Selective Adoption framework to ensure early adoption and not be driven by a major update lifecycle.

New features are deployed to a “Model Office” environment, where functional and business users can review collaboratively and sponsor new features through to production. A great example was how we showcased the capability of PeopleSoft Expenses and its associated approval framework.

Fluid – Improving user navigation and driving self service

The benefit of effectively implementing a Selective Adoption/Continuous Delivery model is that Hays can leverage the capability of the system to deliver real value to its users. Hays’ philosophy is to deliver innovative solutions that look modern, intuitive, drive engagement, and minimize the time needed to complete transactional and self-service interactions for its busy users. The Fluid User Interface provides Hays with just that opportunity for its PeopleSoft users.

To help drive the adoption of self-service, Hays created a fluid-based “My Hays” portal to engage its 4,000 users in the UK and Ireland on a whole range of employee and manager self-service features, including approvals, absence management, payslip retrieval, diversity reporting, and expenses.

My Hays portal fluid homepage:

Expenses fluid dashboard

About Hays

Hays plc (the "Group") is a leading global professional recruiting group. The Group is the expert at recruiting qualified, professional, and skilled people worldwide, being the market leader in the UK and Asia Pacific and one of the market leaders in Continental Europe and Latin America. The Group operates across the private and public sectors, dealing in permanent positions, contract roles and temporary assignments. As of 30 June 2021 the Group employed 10,800 staff operating from 256 offices in 32 markets across 20 specialisms. For the year ended 30 June 2021:

The Group reported net fees of £918.1 million and operating profit (pre-exceptional items) of £95.1 million.
The Group placed around 59,000 candidates into permanent jobs and around 220,000 people into temporary assignments.
The Group generated net fees of 17% in Australia and New Zealand, 27% in Germany, 22% in United Kingdom and Ireland, and 34% in Rest of World (RoW);
The temporary placement business represented 61% of net fees and the permanent placement business represented 39% of net fees.
Hays operates in the following countries: Australia, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, China, Colombia, Chile, the Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Germany, Hungary, India, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, Malaysia, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Singapore, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, UAE, the UK, and the USA.