Simplifying the payroll data migration process with UltiPro Launch

Overview

In the world of HR and payroll, migrating huge amounts of historical payroll data and going live on a new enterprise solution can be stressful and time consuming. Success in cloud data migration is determined by how efficient, accurate, and expeditious the onboarding process can be in getting the system up and running, on time and under budget.

At the time, it wasn't a surprise when a migration and deployment process took well over a year to complete. This was due to the level of accuracy that was needed when parsing and mapping data over to a new system and the amount of tasks and people involved in the process.

The answer to solving the lengthy migration and deployment problem was to re-imagine and build a tool that guided a payroll admin specialist across the necessary tasks to migrate data from one system to another (think ADP to Ultimate Software payroll). There was also a service component to the work that we did in that we had to ensure there was a "back stage" team that was able to support the customer throughout the migration process.

My Involvement

I joined the Ultimate Software (now UKG) to work exclusively on UltiPro Launch as it was a high-profile, net new offering that was going to be built from the ground up.

The team consisted of a product manager, a UX researcher, five business analysts, dozens of engineers and dozens of stakeholders. I was accountable for the UI design, the overall user's experience, product branding, facilitation of co-design/alignment sessions and pairing with engineering on implementation.

Defining Goals and Measures

In the world of cloud data migrations, the goals are pretty clear and straight forward. Get a customers system set up and running, on time and under budget. With that said, we decided to track the following measures:

• 100% accuracy of data during parsing and mapping from the old to the new system.
• Efficiency of teams and collaboration, measured in time for each task to be completed by each team.
• Team awareness and visibility into the stage of the delivery project.

The bet was that if we were able to achieve the goals above, we would decrease the migration time to a fraction of what it normally would take.

Starting with Conversation

As with most projects, I prefer to jump in by getting a good understanding of the current state of things. What are the goals, what's working, what's not, what could be improved, what's an ideal way of doing task x, etc.

Along with the product manager, UX researcher and business analysts, we had dozens of conversations, speaking with system consultants, technical consultants, customers, integration analysts, project managers, UTM consultants and stakeholders involved in the delivery process.

One of the biggest takeaways from our conversations was that the migration and delivery process was messy. One team had no awareness as to what the other team had already done, it was difficult to test the data (think sandbox) prior to migrating and there was a lack of guidance when it came to moving through the workflow.

It was clear why the business saw a need to tackle this problem with a completely new solution that we'd provide to our customers.

Team alignment was a bit of a challenge at first

Given how large the team was, how many of us have not worked together before and the amount of work we needed to do, it was a challenge getting everyone aligned on the phases and ordering of work that needed to be done.

We established a normal cadence of team kickoffs with a 2-day co-design workshop that intended to get the entire team (or a rep from each team) in a room to gain alignment on the next sprint of work.

Although it took months of trial and error to determine what format worked for the team, we landed on a highly focused 2 - 1.5 day co-design session. I standardized the process and documented it in order to share the model with the rest of the teams throughout the company.

I like to think that due to this, the team was able to be lean and efficient in order to deliver UltiPro Launch on time and with quality 🙂

Mapping out the Product

With an understanding of what we needed to build and why, I felt it made sense to map out each page that we'd need to create in order to satisfy the features and requirements that were prioritized by the product team.

In the same effort, we went through many iterations around how the pages would align with the various tasks and workflows. Mapping everything out and tying them together gave the team a macro-level view of how everything connected together and made things easier to prioritize.

Onboarding

Having a proper onboarding experience was key to gathering the right information from the customer in order to provide a seamless and personalized experience. The information collected at this point (as well as during prior consultant engagements) established a good baseline to start with the migration process.

The Dashboard Experience

The purpose of the dashboard was to provide a certain level of awareness and visibility for multiple roles during the activation process. The end user would get high-level counts of where they're tracking along, what's been uploaded, what's done, etc. From here they'd be able to pick up where they left off or dig into whatever task they needed to do during that phase.

User Guidance

For meticulous tasks such as comparing payroll data from one system to another, I designed in contextual tips and hints throughout the experience to help guide the user thorough the process. We utilized Pendo to handle the coach marks and walk throughs.

Other Tasks and Workflows

Some additional tasks and workflows that we're covered in building UltiPro Launch included:

• People setup - Creating profiles for employees.
• Setting up Taxes - This involved collecting forms from the user such as a statement of deposit and setting up tax profiles.
• Payroll Balance Setup
• System Setup - Done by technical consultants.

Branding

I drew up the logo late one night in a hotel. It eventually turned into t-shirts, stickers and the official product logo.

Outcome

We successfully built and launched UltiPro Launch in less than a year. In that effort we improved how we engaged with customers during a very early touch point, streamlined setup, added visibility into a process that was very vague and simplified the parsing, mapping and comparison of payroll data between two disparate HR systems. In addition, we cut the activations time by a fraction from weeks and months to hours.

UltiPro Launch went on to win two gold awards in the 2019 Stevie Awards for the best new "migration as a service" product and helped ultimate software reach their billion dollar revenue milestone.