etting your staff excited about "manager self-service" should not be all
that difficult. After all, its supposed to save a manager time while offering
information at the desktop. What more could they ask for?
Plenty, as it turns out. Managers arent always keen to learn yet another
software program that will allegedly save time and money while making their
lives easier. David Rhodes, a principal at Towers Perrin, says the first move in
getting managers' support is to help them write the specifications for the kind
of system they want.
In addition, human resources and information technology staffs have to make
sure that managers get the training they need to use the program. "You dont
want it to look like a dump and run program, where the notion is do it
yourself, Im going away, " he says.
Corporate culture counts
A companys values and receptiveness to change will go a long way toward
managers' acceptance of an MSS program. Some clients have decided against having
one because of resistance, while others have embraced it and discovered that
managers thrive on the information they can quickly capture from the software,
says Rhodes.
He also suggests a cautious approach to vendors, especially smaller ones that
often have innovative products. You want to make certain they have the capital
to stay in business and are not another dot-bomb. After selecting three or four
vendors to investigate, companies should maintain a list of attributes they
want, or theyll end up watching a salesperson show features that are not
relevant to their businesses.
NuView Systems CEO Shafiq Lokhandwala suggests studying whether the software
is easy to understand and whether it can be configured and customized to a
companys users. The key, he believes, is to buy a software package that can
be customized without having to write new code.
Once the decision has been made, the MSS software should be introduced in a
measured fashion, says Audrey Sullivan, director of HR systems at TASC, an
information management and system engineering firm whose parent company is
Northrop Grumman. Once managers "see the functionality and that it can bring
in a wide new world, theres a tendency to say, We want it all and we want
it immediately.' Take it slowly; dont do too much at one time."
Rhodes says showing a return on investment to executives has proven
difficult. Still, if satisfied managers and human resources professionals are
freed from some of the more routine elements of their day, MSS software has been
a good investment.
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