Salvaging a SuccessFactors Implementation Gone Wrong: A Step-by-Step Guide to Course Correction

During the audit, your goals should be to:

No stone should be left unturned. Gather feedback through surveys, interviews, system audits – whatever it takes to get an unvarnished view of the current state. The more you understand what’s broken, the better equipped you’ll be to fix it.

This audit process can be confronting. You may uncover some harsh truths about lapses in planning, execution, or leadership during the initial implementation. But that’s okay – recognising and owning the failures is the first step towards redemption.

With a clear-eyed assessment in hand, you’ll be ready to start mapping out a targeted SuccessFactors recovery plan. But first, you’ll need to regain critical support from the top.

Section 3: Establish a SuccessFactors Recovery Plan

With executive buy-in secured, it’s time to get to brass tacks and map out your comprehensive SuccessFactors recovery strategy. This master plan will serve as your north star, keeping you focused and on track as you navigate the turbulent waters ahead.

First, you’ll need to clearly define the key goals and objectives you want to accomplish through this do-over implementation. Common focus areas include:

Be specific when articulating your targets to align the entire project team. “Increase user adoption” is too vague – quantify it as “Achieve 85% active usage across all departments within nine months.”

With goals set, prioritise the specific initiatives required to hit those marks based on estimated effort, impacts, dependencies, and timing. Only some things can or should be tackled at a time. Secure some early, high-value wins first to build confidence and momentum.

The biggest piece is establishing a workable roadmap and blueprint for re-implementing SuccessFactors correctly. Whether pursuing a phased rollout or a Big Bang approach, you’ll need to carefully map out the entire process from start to finish this time around:

Learn from previous missteps, anticipate risks, and bake in sufficient breathing room to do things properly. Your team will be empowered to execute effectively with a clear, realistic roadmap.

Don’t try to go it alone, either. This recovery plan should incorporate areas where you may need third-party implementation partners, consultants, or managed services to fill expertise gaps. We’ll cover leveraging external support more later.

The most comprehensive recovery plan is just words on a page without a committed team to execute it daily. Once you have full alignment, it’s time to roll up your sleeves and get to work!

Section 4: Enhance User Experiences

Poor user adoption and engagement are the most common culprits behind failed SuccessFactors implementations. Even a fully configured system packed with features is for nought if employees aren’t actually utilising the tools.

A big part of your SuccessFactors recovery plan must focus on enhancing and optimising the end-user experience. An intuitive, user-friendly system that solves real pains and friction points for employees is critical for driving active adoption.

Start by gathering candid feedback from users on what needs to be fixed. Conduct surveys, interviews, and even usability tests to identify major usability hurdles, frustrations, and areas where the existing processes create more headaches than they resolve.

With this voice-of-the-user data, you can prioritise high-impact improvements and customisations to the SuccessFactors interface and processes. Even small tweaks like simplifying navigation, streamlining workflows, or tailoring dashboards can make a big difference in users’ willingness to embrace the system.

Don’t just listen to the loudest voices, either. Analyse usage metrics and patterns to pinpoint usability snags causing high abandonments or drop-offs for different user roles and personas. Then, iterate designs and configurations accordingly.

Lean heavily on SuccessFactors’ self-service capabilities to empower employees and people managers as much as possible. You’ll reduce administrative burdens and enhance productivity if your workforce can accomplish common tasks autonomously through an intuitive portal.

Effective change management through comprehensive training and clear communication is paramount when optimising the user experience. Even the most thoughtfully designed processes will underwhelm if employees are left confused about how to utilise them properly.

By prioritising UX and continuously incorporating user feedback, you’ll craft experiences that resonate with employees and boost their willingness to make SuccessFactors a natural part of their HR interactions. This is a vital step in unlocking the full potential of your investment.

Section 5: Optimize Integrations and Workflows

As part of your recovery plan, you’ll want to thoroughly review and re-evaluate all existing integrations between SuccessFactors and other third-party applications like HRIS, payroll, recruiting, learning management, and more. Identify any connectivity breakdowns, syncing issues, or other weak points in integration.

Don’t just take the “set it and forget it” approach with integrations, either. New innovations, enhanced middleware tools, and integration process improvements are frequently released. There may be opportunities to improve performance, increase security, streamline data mapping, and unlock deeper cross-system functionality.

Take a hard look at what processes and workflows should be migrated into SuccessFactors. Many still rely on manual steps, emailed forms, or other workarounds. Leveraging the platform’s native capabilities around automation, approvals, and paperless transactions can remove enormous bottlenecks and administrative burdens.

For example, you may still have employees completing open enrollment by filling out PDFs and delivering them to HR. A quick optimisation could be automating that entire process within the SuccessFactors platform – having employees enter their elections directly, routing approvals, and updating changes in payroll digitally.

As you update workflows, incorporate feedback from audits and each process owner to identify areas of complexity, redundancy, or opportunities to be more employee-centric. With creative thinking, you can re-architect overly complex processes into cleaner, more intuitive workflows.

This is a prime area for teams needing more internal integration resources or SuccessFactors process expertise to engage third-party specialists. They can bring their integration chops and workflow optimisation experience to fill those gaps.

By overhauling integrations and streamlining processes, you’ll unlock significant gains in data integrity, workforce productivity, and the overall usability of SuccessFactors in your environment. It’s a force multiplier that will maximise your returns.

Section 6: Upskill Your SuccessFactors Team

Your turnaround efforts can only go so far without a skilled internal team to support and administer the system long-term.

SuccessFactors is a robust, highly configurable platform. Competent power users and administrators who intimately understand its capabilities and can properly configure, maintain, and evolve the environment over time are critical.

Assess whether your current SuccessFactors team has the right skills, certifications, and expertise to manage the post-recovery implementation effectively. There may have been sufficient training gaps or turnover during the initial deployment that left you deficient.

Invest in comprehensive training through SAP or third-party SuccessFactors training providers if upskilling is required. Ensure technical and functional staff go through rigorous coursework to master the modules, configurations, integrations, reporting, and administrative capabilities.

Go beyond training the system administrators, too. Frontline HR staff leveraging SuccessFactors daily should receive tailored training to become “power users” for facilitating processes and supporting employees. You may also want to establish a network of departmental “super users” to serve as local experts.

Encourage your SuccessFactors team to continually update their skills through ongoing education, participation in user groups, and tapping into the wider SAP community. SuccessFactors is an evolving platform with new features and updated functionality released regularly. Keeping up with the latest innovations is key.

Consider having SuccessFactors team members pursue and maintain relevant certifications as well. Credentialed professionals signal expertise to employees and leadership. It’s a verifiable commitment to mastering the platform for long-term success.

If staffing constraints or niche skill gaps arise, this may be an area to augment your team with third-party managed services or contracted SuccessFactors specialists. An expert-led managed services model offloads routine administration while providing on-demand expertise.

By investing in a team of highly skilled, motivated SuccessFactors professionals, you’ll have the internal capabilities to properly operate, optimise, and maximise the value of your implementation for years to come. It’s a critical piece of long-term sustainment.

Section 7: Leverage External Expertise

Recovering from a struggling SuccessFactors implementation is no small undertaking. Even with the best-laid plans and an all-star internal team, you may still need more bandwidth, expertise or specialised skills to execute properly.

This is where supplementing your efforts with external SuccessFactors consultants and managed services providers can be invaluable. An outside perspective from seasoned professionals brings objectivity and a wealth of cross-client experience to your project.

When exploring potential implementation partners, evaluate their SuccessFactors credentials, vertical experience, resource pool, and delivered success stories. Top-tier providers will have consultants certified across SuccessFactors modules, proven methodologies, and extensive case studies showing their ability to course-correct failed implementations.

Request references and speak candidly with previous clients about the quality of the consultant’s work, their ability to overcome hurdles, and whether they delivered expected results on time and within budget.

Implementation partners can provide skilled resources to fill shortages on your internal team, augment with niche capabilities like data migration or integrations, and objectively identify risks or issues your team may have missed.

If taking on a full re-implementation seems too monumental for your existing resources, managed services could be ideal. With managed services, you offload the bulk of SuccessFactors administration, maintenance, and optimisation to the provider.

A managed services model can deliver consistent, affordable expertise without hiring, training, and retaining an entire SuccessFactors support team internally. You gain a personal pool of certified experts and potential cost savings compared to staffing those roles yourself.

The right managed services partner will proactively monitor your environment, optimise processes, triage issues, apply updates and patches, and ensure your org is leveraging SuccessFactors’ full functionality.

Whether leveraging implementation consultants for an accelerated project burst or handing the long-term SuccessFactors keys to a managed service provider, securing outside guidance from proven experts increases your odds of a successful recovery.

Be diligent in your crucial role of vetting potential partners and ensuring they are a good cultural fit. You’re entrusting them with a vital part of optimising one of your most strategic technology investments.

Section 8: Measure and Report on Progress

As you execute your SuccessFactors recovery plan, it’s critical to implement rigorous metrics for tracking progress, demonstrating value, and holding the project team accountable. Well-defined KPIs provide targets to orient everyone’s efforts and quantifiable ways to showcase success.

Revisiting the key goals and objectives you outlined during the planning phase. Those overarching targets should form the backbone of your measurement framework. For each goal, identify the key performance indicators that will allow you to determine whether you’re achieving that outcome.

For example, if a core goal is “increasing employee self-service utilisation”, relevant KPIs could include:

Go beyond measuring SuccessFactors usage metrics. Consider incorporating operational KPIs that demonstrate bottom-line impacts, such as cost savings from streamlined processes, workforce productivity improvements, or staffing and compliance metrics gains.

Establish a cadence for systematically tracking and reporting on these KPIs throughout the implementation. Leverage SuccessFactors’ native reporting and analytics capabilities, data visualisation tools, and centralised dashboards to turn raw data into digestible insights.

Be transparent about areas where you’re falling short of goals, but also ensure you’re loudly celebrating successes and key milestones. Communicate those wins broadly across stakeholders to maintain momentum and reinforce the value being realised from the recovery effort.

Don’t just report tactically on project execution, either. Make a point to quantify and showcase the full ROI picture as the implementation matures. Hard numbers demonstrating cost savings, cost avoidance, revenue impacts, and more from the optimised SuccessFactors environment will solidify support from leadership.

Consistently measuring and reporting on a mix of operational and financial KPIs keeps everyone marching towards a common set of objectives. It turns recovery into a data-driven process focused on outcomes rather than just a series of checklist activities. It’s a critical component of long-term SuccessFactors success.

Conclusion

So there you have it – a step-by-step guide to getting your SuccessFactors implementation back on track if things have gone awry.

Don’t lose hope! You can turn around even a wildly off-course project with targeted troubleshooting, open communication, and a willingness to make changes.

Stay focused on the end goals, be honest about what’s not working, get the right people involved, and keep chipping away at the issues piece by piece. It will take some effort, but you’ll get there.

And just imagine how great it will feel to have a smoothly running system that delivers real value. So take a deep breath, make a plan, and start taking those steps – you’ve got this!