Feedback from 6 Region Rollout
I am the HRIS Technical Advisor for the Namibia HIV Prevention, Care and Support Program, which is rolling out the central-level Human Resource Management Information System (HRIMS) to all the regional HR Management (HRM) offices. We have just completed the HRIMS rollout to a further 6 regions after a successful rollout to 3 pilot regions in 2009. As part of the project management methodology we used, we have drafted a Lessons Learned Questionnaire and I will be sharing with you the process we followed as well as the summarised results.
We asked our HR users and project team members to complete questionnaires in which they rated various project areas as follows:
- Excellent =3
- Successful =2
- Unsuccessful =1
Feedback from users
We received an overall 84% success rating from the HR users, indicating the project to be successful from the user's perspective. Due to various factors (more of these in future posts...), we placed our order for new hardware and equipment in mid November 2009 and did not receive all terminals and computers, with 15 users who only received their equipment in January 2010 and they were not happy at all when they rated us! 48% indicated the project was excellent and thus exceeded their expectations! Nice to receive such a glowing feedback after the hard work the project team put in!
Comments received from the users indicated that they were happy to have access to information when it comes to the Public Service Management Circulars, as well as with maintaining the HRIMS system, which will minimize their manual work and especially the calculation of statistics. They were also happy that the majority of the staff members in each of the HRM offices have been equipped with a PC or Terminal and are able to use it.
Users are generally more positive about the terminals than they were with the pilot project, as we are now using the regional servers bought by MoHSS to act as terminal servers in the regional office, which improved the response times users are experiencing on the terminals. This is because network printing and network authentication is now done in the office as opposed to over the wide area networks (WAN) links. Users are also able to access their documents offline when the WAN links are down, since the regional servers also act as file servers.
Users have requested that the USB ports be activated on the terminals. We initially restricted the USB ports due to the poor performance of the anti-virus solution that the MoHSS was running – the ports will be opened once we have assessed the new anti-virus solution the project assisted the MoHSS in acquiring.
Feedback from project team
In general, the project team members rated the project to be 92% successful with 41% indicating it was executed excellently!
The helpdesk operations is the only project area which was deemed to be highly unsuccessful by the project team members with feedback indicating that the response times to users support calls are not satisfactory. This is a direct result of the acute shortage of MoHSS IT staff - a topic for another day! I would love to hear how other projects are addressing this problem.
I find it interesting though that the HR users rated the same project area, helpdesk operations, to be 88% successful as opposed to the 57% unsuccessful and 43% successful rating for the same project area from the project team members. Seems to me that we are lucky to have very tolerant users in Namibia? However, we do have a dedicated project team that do not look for excuses, but admit where they need help!