CHALLENGE

The Ontario government’s human resource file system is paper-based.  It is comprised of over 6,000,000 paper documents that are stored in a over 12 different locations across a province that is 1.07 million square kilometres.

There are more than 8 standalone, homegrown legacy systems that manage the manual processes surrounding the movement, security, maintenance, and archiving of the paper documents.

There are also more than 10 different employee types that would have access to these files, all with different security clearances and rights to see different types of information.

I was asked to create a complete business case and strategy for the implementation of a system that would digitize all current paper-based human resource files for all 60, 000 employees. The business plan also had to include all financial projections, communications plans and change management strategies that would be required for approval at the highest level of government.

This project dealt with high-sensitivity documents and as such was covered by a non-disclosure agreement (NDA).

PLANNING

Planning for this project was incredibly complex and involved getting buy-in from many different stakeholders throughout the Ontario government.

Stakeholders from top levels of management from all business areas in all ministries, legal, the Archives of Ontario and the Ontario government’s Accessibility Office were briefed, consulted and asked to participate in ongoing communities of practice that I organized and chaired.

I additionally had to engage and manage 8 various IT divisions within government to source various services and costing such as server systems, back-end and front end architecture and development services, document scanning services with the latest OCR and accessibility services possible.

BUSINESS REQUIREMENTS/SERVICE DESIGN

I mapped out all business processes and requirements of manual and legacy system functions in order to create a end-to-end management model for documents as they passed through different approval and review processes.

I also recorded the different positions and security access that each employee who managed the documents had and estimated the amount of time that each process currently took.

I rolled up these business requirements based on business division and worked with the IT clusters to ensure the systems that they were proposing were able to be meet these requirements.

PERSONAS AND WIRE-FRAMES

From the business requirements and workflow documentation, I was able to create various personas covering different staff positions from various business divisions that would have access to request, review, add to or manage various documents within an employee’s human resource file.

I also developed wireframes which dealt with each business area’s management human resource file.

At all stages of development, I validated the personas and wireframes with each business area in order to ensure they accurately reflected the staff and the business processes that needed to be captured.

BUSINESS CASE AND COSTING

A business case, costing proposal (covering the first five years of build, launch and annual spend), along with a 2 year communications roll out and change management strategy was written and presented to senior management.

OUTCOME

The business case was accepted and embraced by senior management.

However, due to the fact that the project would have cost more that 7 million dollars, the initiative would have had to be presented to the highest budgetary body in the public sector for analysis and approval. As such the proposal was placed on hold.