Welcome back to our three-part series on Kronos Workforce Dimensions—Mistakes to Avoid. Our first article covered everything you need to consider before getting started with implementation, such as building the right project team and the importance of developing a detailed business structure.
Now, we’re going to go further into the implementation process and cover data gathering, configurations, and user acceptance testing (UAT). Let’s get started with our list of mistakes to avoid when implementing Workforce Dimensions.
Gather Detailed Data Before Submitting Your PTF Worksheet
During your implementation, you’ll be required to submit a PTF document to the Kronos team—a spreadsheet that outlines your scheduling policy data, organizational structure, work rules, and more. This spreadsheet can be a bit intimidating, especially for people who’ve never implemented Kronos before.
In our experience, we find that the biggest mistake clients make in this situation is that they only consult an expert consultant after they’ve already turned in their PTF worksheet, only to find out that it really doesn’t represent what their organization needs from Kronos Dimensions. This tends to result in a failed go-live because the worksheet wasn’t filled out correctly at the beginning. (After all, a house isn’t going to stay up very long if it doesn’t have a strong foundation.)
The data-gathering phase is critical to laying down that stable foundation, especially if you work in an industry with unusual work rules. For example, if someone can’t earn overtime pay until they’ve worked a specific amount of hours in a 28-day period, you better make sure that’s in your PTF worksheet, or you going to have major headaches down the road.
An expert consultant can help you gather important details like these and guide you through the completion of your PTF worksheet. Here are some other things that will help you succeed with this:
- Speak to a sponsor in every single department that will be influenced by the software
- Look at whatever union contracts, special state laws, that may apply to your unique situation
- Outline your “personas,” roles for all the people who will be using Kronos (supervisors, IT, finance, employees, etc.)
A quality consultant will study your organization and help you build a system that will serve everyone across the entire organization.
Involve the Right People in Configuration and Integration
Once you’ve delivered a detailed and accurate PTF worksheet, Kronos primarily handles the configuration process. As you wait for the Kronos team to work on your configurations, it’s time to start setting up your integrations.
Interoperability between Workforce Dimensions and other software applications used throughout your organization is vital to delivering a seamless user experience. Not to mention the fact that it’ll save time and extend the use of your workforce management solution.
Bringing in a third-party consultant to assist with your configuration and implementation process can ensure this whole process goes smoothly, and that everything functions properly once you’re ready for go-live.
Develop an Effective User Acceptance Testing Strategy
The first step to effective Kronos testing is ensuring you have a good test strategy and a structured testing process in place. Time and time again, we see customers struggle with testing because they lack a structured process and rely on ad-hoc processes that end up costing them valuable time and money in the long run.
User Acceptance Testing (UAT) validates that your end-to-end workflows meet business requirements. Kronos typically does Unit Testing to make sure that what’s configured is doing what it’s supposed to, however, we recommend that your end-users and subject matter experts double-check this testing so you don’t have errors when you try to run them.
Additionally, make sure you’re testing at least one of each persona (that you created in the pre-PTF worksheet phase) as well as every pay rule that’s been built. Note that doing so will require training at least one representative of each persona. Kronos has its own system for training representatives, but a third-party consultant can take things one step further. While Kronos can give you a few test cases, an expert consultant will know what other areas would be worth testing based on your org’s unique customizations.
Hopefully, this article has helped you identify the problems and solutions you can encounter during Kronos Workforce Dimensions implementation. In our third and final part of this series, we’ll highlight everything you need to know before going live.
In the meantime, if you have any questions, our expert Kronos consulting team is here to help.
