The Human Relations Management division of a major federal government agency needed to migrate its legacy human resources technology platform to the cloud and at the same time enhance core business functionality. By doing so the agency could more effectively and efficiently achieve its recruiting objectives and improve employee service management for its existing 60,000+ employees. To better achieve this goal, the organization realized it also needed to improve analytical capabilities to provide faster, more accurate insights into operational performance.

Agility Technologies was hired to assess the viability of Salesforce as a suitable platform for this modernization effort and to develop a solution design and strategic roadmap for the eventual implementation.

To deliver on these objectives, Agility conducted a high-level analysis of the existing technology platform. Through several in-depth working sessions and ongoing daily meetings with key members of the technology team, Agility documented detailed requirements, underlying software and infrastructure, various internal and external users and data sources, and general business processes associated with both the current- and future-state platforms.

To further investigate and demonstrate the suitability of a Salesforce platform for HR management processes, Agility also created proofs-of-concepts (POCs), snippets of functionality that tested core Salesforce capabilities against agency use-cases. The team worked closely with the customer program team to define the objectives of each POC and to ensure relevancy among the larger stakeholder audience. Additionally, to foster education and engagement among the legacy development team, Agility guided select developers on the customer side to collaboratively build-out certain aspects of the POCs.

In conjunction with this hands-on training, Agility also helped the agency work through revised staffing models that aligned with a future Salesforce-based environment. These exercises helped the agency further refine immediate as well as long-term budget requirements.

Key deliverables and outputs:

• A Salesforce architecture and solution design – this document mapped existing technology components including data sources, integration layers, and various HR processes to a high-level Salesforce architecture. It included an estimated level of complexity related to the amount of configuration, customization, and data integration required to re-platform existing technology on Salesforce.
• User stories – written with the implementation vendor in mind – these were to capture at a high-level key business and functional requirements and to provide insight into the breadth of the potential re-platforming scope.
• Implementation plan – a document that presented options for the order and timing of deployment for the different components associated with each implementation approach.