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Applying Agile to HR Processes
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Business Process Improvements Applying Agile Methods
Business Process Improvements Applying Agile Methods
PROBLEM STATEMENT
Multinational companies departments have formal structured processes, that don’t
perform well in a changing and demanding resultsdriven environment.
These processes have trouble to be aligned to other areas and don’t react on time to
changes
PROBLEM FORMULATION
Is it possible to improve Human Resourcesspecific processes, such as recruiting,
training, policywriting by applying agile methodologies?
Which methodology is better to the HR area based on the structure of existing
teams, internal customers, and expected goals of the area?
GENERAL GOAL
This dissertation presents the possibility of implementing agile methodologies which
are currently successfully applied in software development processes in HR
recruitment process.
SPECIFIC GOALS
● Identify business processes that are likely to be improved applying agile
methodologies: processes with many changes, demand of shortterm results.
● Identify metrics to determine the current state of business process, and
measure them to determine an initial baseline
● Select a business process identified and apply an agile methodology on it to
prove the dissertation experiment
● Obtain metrics from the business process after implementing the new
methodology.
HYPOTHESIS
Applying Kanban methodology in the HR department will improve the outcome of the
deliverables to internal customers (recruiting, training, policy definition)
RESEARCH DESIGN
Implementing Kanban methodology in one of the HR processes, such as recruiting
and compare the previous process without the methodology, using selected metrics
and comparing after and before state.
THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK
Lean Management method was born in Toyota and was created by Taiichi Ono and
their fundamentals are based in two pillars, the "justintime" and automation with a
human touch or "autonomation" the term "Autonomation" in English, which is the tool
to operate the Kanban. The software development processes both SCRUM and
KANBAN derived from these practices. Both of them limits some variable of the
production process. In the case of SCRUM, limits the cycle time of production, in the
case of KANBAN, limits the amount of work to be done at each step of the process.
This dissertation compares both Kanban and Scrum stating characteristics of each
process and compare them. In the comparison, follow up meetings, and metrics are
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Business Process Improvements Applying Agile Methods
analyzed. Based on this comparison, I selected Kanban to be implemented in the
Recruiting Process of the HR department, because it adapts better to nonsoftware
development processes, as is more generic and agnostic.
METRICS
Some metrics that be useful to determine the impact of the new methodology where
selected and measured before and after applying the Kanban methodology to
compare results and obtain conclusions.
These metrics were obtained using interviews with the HR team and Polls.
● Team Knowledge of recruitment process and metrics : 25% knows the
process completely, 50% knowledge of process metrics.
● Team awareness of team member priorities: 75% of the team members don’t
know their peers priorities
● Communication and collaboration feeling: only 50% thinks comms and
collaborations are high, the other 50% thinks is average.
● Priorities set up: 75% of the team, thinks urgent requests are prioritized over
important requests.
● Open positions: each team member manages more than 10 different open
positions at the same time.
● Feel of efficiency: only 50% of the team perceived that their work is efficient /
effective, and most of them describes they could better perform the same if
put focus on their priorities. We also observe that the team perceives a high
degree of disorder, leading them to extremes where reinterview the same
candidate 2 times.
EMPIRICAL FRAMEWORK: IMPROVING THE PROCESS IMPLEMENTING
KANBAN
To implement KANBAN in the recruiting process, I conducted several meetings, and
work together with the Recruitment team with the following tools:
● Process discovery: I selected interviews to discover existing recruitment
process and draw it in a way that makes simple to be understood by the team.
The process were then implemented in a KANBAN Board with cards
representing each open position and each candidate.
● KANBAN Board: in which carries out the monitoring process with each state
determined, control conditions of each state, and the boundaries of Work in
● Progress of each statecards.
Kanban needs to represent both requests for staff and candidates.
Daily meetings were done every day to monitor and "move" the cards across
the board, representing the process of pull of requirements and candidates to
the final income of a “hired” employee.
The purpose of the experiment is to implement the process respecting the current
model, but trying that in applying Kanban. With this, the team can achieve the
following objectives:
● Display WIP (Work in Progress)
● Prioritizing searches based on their importance but also the process support
emergency searches that have an “express” process
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Business Process Improvements Applying Agile Methods
The illustration above shows the flags they can be added to an Open Position Card. These flags visually
indicates if the application is delayed or if is more important than the rest and serve the team as an alert, that can
be easily identified in the daily meetings, and give them priority over other applications in the same state.
CANDIDATE CARD
This card is added in the preselection stage of the thread selection board and
indicates the data of a candidate can be selected to a particular open position.
ID TALEO: id of the candidate
POSITION NAME
CANDIDATE NAME
F.INGRESO: Date of reception of the CV. Face indicate status
of the candidate for the position.
MEASURING THE IMPACT OF THE EXPERIMENT
To measure the result of the implementation of the Kanban method in the
recruitment process several actions were taken:
A new survey with the recruitment team, this survey was similar to the initial but with
some additional questions, with the following results
● Improved index knowledge of recruitment process 50% to 100%, as the team
participated in the whole implementation, which leveled the knowledge of the
process.
● Improvements were evident in several aspects, the most significant being
identified by respondents are:
o Process order: as the team use the board every day for their standup
meetings, they can follow the real process in the correct order of steps.
o Priority setting: having a quick look at the number of cards in each
step, and following the delays and priority flags, they can priotitize
candidates to avoid them to left the process,
o Team knows limits WIP (work in progress) as now is measured on
the board.
● The teams knows better about their partners open positions, knowledge about
other’s open position increase from 25% to 33%.
● Collaboration and communication index increased from 50% to 66%. This is
observed due to the compulsory daily meeting at which at least everyone can see
all the recruitment process.
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Business Process Improvements Applying Agile Methods
● With regard to equipment feeling about the recruitment process improvement is
significant. The overwhelm feeling is lower, since the answer Overwhelmed in
the survey was 0%.
● The sense of order in process is better as 33% felt that the process is now Very
ordered and predictable, when initially was 0%. Now, 66% expressed that
some things are predictible and others needs some improvements, but this
index increased 16% over the value of the initial survey.
● Priorities of the team moved slightly, having urgent a value of 75% and prior a
value of 25. The item Overdue was 0%. This is because the team ordered the
workflow and reduced bottlenecks therefore eliminated delays, although they still
have priorities and urgent searches.
● With regard to the workload is observed that although the number of open
positions were not reduced, the value corresponding to more than 20 decreaced
from 50% to 33% indicating a gradual improvement in the workload.
● Also, the percentage of people with feeling that the process is efficient
increased from 50% to 67%.
● Finally is important to remark, that although an extra effort for the team to
change their previous way of working through this, 100% recommends
implementing the Kanban method in another process of the company.
Lost candidates board: candidates who
left the process for different reasons, are
included in this board, in order to
measure the reasons why which a
candidate left the recruiting process
before finalizing all the steps.
Retrospective meetings: sessions
where the team measure what went well
and what went wrong, and what should
be improved in the process, using the
"Mad, Sad method was performed, Glad
"(Derby & Larsen, 2006)
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