Where to Start

Most workforce management work starts with a product evaluation. The order that works starts with four queries against systems you already have.

The four queries

Headcount per system, and who exists in one and not another.

Reference data lists, compared across systems.

Hours sent against hours paid, for one period.

Absences recorded against gaps in the time record.

An hour each, and together they tell you which join is worst.

Weeks one to four

Run the four queries.

Draw the chain: which system feeds which, by what mechanism, on what schedule, owned by whom.

One page. Most organisations have never drawn it, and the drawing itself finds things — usually a join nobody knew existed and one everybody assumed was automated.

List the manual steps, by asking the people who do them.

Weeks five to eight

Fix identity. One master, everything else referencing it.

Because nothing else works until this does, and the four queries will have shown how bad it is.

Then reference data, with an owner per dimension.

Neither requires buying anything.

Weeks nine to twelve

Write the rule register: every pay rule and which system applies it.

Reconstruct three people's pay by hand against it.

Set up the monthly reconciliation.

Then, if a purchase is still indicated, evaluate against the joins rather than the features.

What to avoid

Buying before the chain is drawn, because the specification will describe modules rather than boundaries.

Fixing the join that is most annoying rather than the one that is worst — they are rarely the same, and the annoying one is usually visible precisely because someone is compensating for it.

Starting with forecasting, which is an optimisation on top of a chain that does not reconcile.

Treating identity as a technical detail.

What a quarter should produce

A drawn chain with named owners per join.

A rule register.

One master for identity and for each reference dimension.

A reconciliation running monthly.

And a decision about tooling made on evidence rather than on a demonstration — which may be that the estate is adequate and the joins were the problem.

Draw the chain on one page

The exercise that finds things before any analysis does.

Which system feeds which, by what mechanism, on what schedule, owned by whom.

Most organisations have never drawn it.

The drawing itself typically finds two things: a join nobody knew existed, and one everybody assumed was automated.

An afternoon, with the people who run each module in the room.

Turn the boundary into a test

For a concrete product reference, https://www.monitask.com/ can help turn this boundary into a test. Verify the current behaviour with representative fields and record what reaches the destination.