Key Elements for Managing your Kronos Project: Starting the Journey

Have you been selected to manage a Kronos project in your organization? Congratulations! Leading a Kronos project is challenging, fast-paced and sometimes trying. But in the end, it’s a lot of fun to cross the go-live finish line with your team and deliver a unique and valuable WFM solution to your organization. 

I’d like to share with you some project management methods and tools I’ve found useful in large and complex WFM implementations and upgrades.

These project phases (also known as stages or gates) help for better project planning:

• Initiating your project (sometimes called the chartering phase)

• Requirements Definition phase: clearly defining the features of the system you’ll be building

• Then onto the Design phase

• The Development phase—where you Build the solution

• The Testing phase such as: Unit, System, Integration, User Acceptance and Parallel

• Deployment phase: which is going live with your Kronos solution

When you are initiating a project, you’ll focus on the project management triangle 

• Scope – what will be included in this project, and what’s not included

• Schedule – determining the time needed to deliver the requirements 

• Cost – also known as budget. The cost of all resources needed to complete project tasks 

Your Kronos project is being undertaken to create a unique result for your organization. The project must meet the specific requirements for your users and business processes. During the initiating phase, you may want to pinpoint key success factors for the project; and it’s helpful to describe both the current state, and the future state. In your project charter, specifically list what problems you are trying to solve.

Examples of Project Success Factors:                 Current                                        Future

-More relevant data to Management quicker      Labor hours posted weekly    Labor hours posted daily

-Supervisors spend same amount or less time    2 to 4 hr/wk                     1 to 3 hrs/wkprocessing payroll and scheduling activities

As you build your charter, it becomes a pact between all involved—the project team, sponsors, and all users of the Kronos tool—describing the parameters of engagement for the project.

Throughout your project you’ll want to identify and continually revisit project risks (potential points of failure—causing your project to not go as planned), issues, dependencies and constraints. And I’ve found it’s important to be discussing these critical project deliverables early on in the project: 

• Determining your Testing approach,

• Developing Training tailored specific to all users, and

• Change Management: How will you manage the change that this Kronos project brings?

We’ll dig deeper into the project phases in future posts, but now I’d like to hear from you. What project phase are you currently in—Chartering? Building the solution? Testing?

And what’s your greatest project management challenge now? That is, what’s keeping you up at night?

Please leave your thoughts by adding a comment below. Thanks!

Here’s to your successful project planning,

Cindy

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