We’ve already discussed why you need to establish your supervisor structure ahead of taking on a payroll implementation. Something else to keep in mind is that it’s not just about driving decisions makers to understand your organization and the strategies necessary to take it in the right direction. The important thing is making sure those decision makers are empowered.
We have worked with some that were not empowered in the past, which means we sat waiting for weeks, even though they had already made the decisions we needed to move forward. Since they were not empowered within the organization, we were really waiting for the right person to finally sign off on it. In addition to having empowered supervisors, you should be prepared to backfill for day-to-day operations. At our first successful payroll implementation, they didn't backfill and it about killed the person who was responsible for their normal job, as well as working with our team throughout every stage of the project.
When you’re deciding who should be in a supervisor position, it's useful to have people with similar functional experience to your project team. You can then hire backfill staff temps to be able to do your normal operational things, which is something we do a lot. We augment teams and do their day-to-day responsibilities, because most of our HR and payroll professionals can handle those systems. This gives you the opportunity to involve your end users in testing as much as possible. The more time they can spend getting their hands on the system, the better everything will be when you go live.
