Preparing for your SuccessFactors Workforce Analytics Implementation

Implementing SuccessFactors Workforce Analytics (WFA) is different from implementing the other SuccessFactors modules. In this blog we cover five considerations that your organization should ask itself before beginning your implementation to ensure that it goes smoothly and quickly.

Need help? To find out about 3n Strategy's WFA implementation services, please click here.

1. What is our SuccessFactors people analytics strategy?

How will your organization make the most of analytics? What types of decisions merit a data-driven approach? After one year past go-live, what does your sponsor agree that success looks like? 

These are the types of questions that SuccessFactors customers fail to ask and answer which often results in slow implementations, and worse, low utilisation after WFA has gone live. In fact our 2020 people analytics survey of the SuccessFactors ecosystem, only 39% of customers felt they understood what their HR sponsors' goals and objectives were. 

Defining success with Workforce Analytics (or any other HR analytics tool) usually requires some additional work by SuccessFactors customers. Other modules tend to reflect a defined operational HR process that your users have to use and it is obvious when they are failing. For example, they have to manage careers in the tool, hire people, assign curriculums, rate performance and so on. Analytics can create evidence improve any HR decision - but there is nothing that forces a decision-making to log-in and access the tool.

Before you begin implementing Workforce Analytics (or any people analytics tool) stop to consider... What is our people analytics strategy and what does success look like? 

NEXT STEP: watch our on-demand webinar on 'An Introduction to People Analytics Strategy' right now, please click here.

2. What Workforce Analytics Metrics Packs do we need? 

Included within your SuccessFactors licence are thousands of HR metrics and dimensions, which are categorised into 17 different Metrics Packs. The Metrics Packs are usually linked to a particular SuccessFactors module, i.e. Performance Metrics, or a particular HR topic, i.e. Survey Metrics or Talent Flow Metrics. 

Metrics Packs are important because most SuccessFactors customers do not need all of them (or at least, not all at once), and not all Metrics Packs are available on the different versions of Workforce Analytics. It also takes more time and money to implement more metrics packs.

You need to consider which metrics and dimensions your organisation needs to implement, and what order to implement them in.

NEXT STEP: To watch our on-demand on 'An Introduction to Workforce Analytics Metrics Packs" right now, please click here.

NEXT STEP: To read our Frequently Asked Questions about Workforce Analytics, including information on Metrics Packs, please click here.

3. What is the SuccessFactors Workforce Analytics implementation process? 

Implementing Workforce Analytics can be a bit different from the other SuccessFactors modules. Creating and reading the workbooks for WFA (or 'specifications' as they are called in WFA) are different, as is the project management, testing and on-going maintenance. 

Depending on which version of WFA you choose, it can take 5-10 weeks to implement each WFA metrics pack during which time your internal implementation team and your implementation partner will need to carry out very specific tasks to implement and test your new metrics. 

The process looks something like this:

When the customer team (or the implementation partner) are unfamiliar with implementing WFA they often face massive delays - from a few weeks to months. We highly recommend that you ensure your partner has the expertise to manage and deliver your WFA project, and that the implementation team within the customer organisation receive some training too.

NEXT STEP: To watch our webinar on 'Everything You Need to Know About WFA', please click here.

NEXT STEP: To find out the dates of our half-day workshop on 'Learning to Implement WFA' (which is included within our implementation services), please click here.

4. Do we have implementation right team? 

Only 45% of SuccessFactors customers have company-wide set of definitions for basic HR metrics, which does not include the hundreds of more interesting HR metrics that WFA will give your organization access to. To implement WFA successfully (and quickly) your customer team needs to have the skills and the ability to make certain decisions about HR metrics. 

To implement SuccessFactors Workforce Analytics your team will need to make decisions about HR metrics in your organisation. All HR metrics have three definitions: their HR definition, their calculated/statistical definition and their system definition. The good news is that WFA comes pre-packages with best practice definitions for all its thousands of metrics and dimensions. However your internal customer team will need to agree and finalize which definitions to use and ensure they are appropriate for your culture. The best place to look for these skills? Try your existing reporting and analytics teams.

And don't forget - your implementation partner should guide you, helping your organization to agree company wide metric-definitions whilst ensuring that you do not invalidate WFA's benchmarks.

BONUS SKILLS: In addition to these technical and reporting skills, your team will benefit from having internal strategic consulting skills to work with the business to deploy WFA in the most strategic way. This type of work will enable your organisation to create a strong set of WFA dashboards.

5. How good is our SuccessFactors data? 

Having so many modules, SuccessFactors customers have a huge advantage when it comes to data, and they know it - 79% of SuccessFactors customers rate their basic HR data quality as good (compared with 57% of the global people analytics industry according to the HR Analytics ThinkTank research). However only 21% of SuccessFactors customers felt that their organization knows what HR data to collect for the purposes of people/workforce analytics, which only 24% having a plan for how the use of HR metrics will evolve over time.

SuccessFactors customers should take comfort from know that they collect so much HR data, and that it is generally in a good enough condition for basic analytics. However it is important to build an HR data strategy into your people analytics strategy.

NEXT STEP: To find out how 3n Strategy can help your build your people analytics and HR data strategy, please click here.

BONUS. Are we prepared for post-go live Workforce Analytics work?

This is not necessary for implementing WFA however it is important to consider: how will you manage and maintain WFA after go-live? Unlike the other SuccessFactors modules, the use of WFA can and should evolve. Not only will your organisation probably want to implement additional metrics packs, tweak and even create custom metrics, update its WFA Dashboards and more. The skills your implementation team will learn about WFA will put them in a great position to take over ownership of WFA after it is live on production - this may be worth considering when planning the implementation to begin with.

If you would like to find out about 3n Strategy's WFA implementation services, please click here. Also if you found this information useful and would like to access more, please check out our other WFA blogs and webinars.