Portfolio Case Study · Indiana University
Twenty Years of HR Knowledge Lived in People's Heads
Indiana University Human Resources. Salesforce Service Cloud. My role: Assistant Project Manager and Lead Business Analyst.
The visible problem
Indiana University Human Resources serves faculty and staff across every campus. Questions about jobs, benefits and staff policies came in to ten HR centers of expertise and a main HR Customer Care Center.
There was no shared system for any of it. IU HR's HR2020 plan set out to "improve HR customer service" and "streamline HR transactions across the university."
The request on the table was a system. One place where every employee request became a case that someone owned until it was done.
The real problem
Everything was done by hand.
A request lived in an email, a phone call, a conversation or a Post-it note. There were no checks and no balances. If someone went on vacation, their open requests depended on them remembering to hand them off.
And the steps for handling a request were not written down anywhere. The department depended on staff who had been there twenty years or more and simply knew what needed to happen. There was no documented training program, because the training was them.
A case management system needs to know the steps. You cannot configure a process nobody has written down.
So the first job was not building anything. It was getting the work out of people's heads.
What I did
We built the process maps from scratch, capturing every step the teams took to handle a request.
I ran the interviews and focus groups, documented the process flows and use cases, and wrote the requirements and the test plans. I reported to the project manager for IU's Lifetime Engagement initiative, the university's enterprise Salesforce program, and wrote the Jira specifications the engineering team built from.
Then we built what had never existed: a documented training program for HR staff, alongside training on Salesforce itself.
Leadership wanted a knowledge base built for IU, not a generic one. So we took Salesforce's own training material and rebuilt it with IU screenshots and IU example processes, so staff saw their own work on the page.
What we built
One case-based service request system connecting the ten HR centers of expertise and the HR Customer Care Center.
Service desk consoles, email templates, and reports and dashboards, with Marketing Cloud for employee communications.
Every employee case record and every request attached to it, in one place.
And because the steps were now written down, cross-trained staff could give consistent answers instead of every answer depending on who picked up the phone.
What happened next
I was there as the system went live in 2017, and I left Indiana University right around the same time. Everything below is what the system went on to do, published by Salesforce and IU, not results I ran myself.
- More than 13,000 customer service cases in the first six months, according to Salesforce's published story on IU.
- More than 51,000 customer interactions in askHR's first year, reported by John Whelan, IU's Vice President for Human Resources.
- Well over 1,000 benefits support cases a month, from the same report.
In October 2017 IU HR launched askHR, described as "the one-stop shop for IU employees with questions about jobs at IU, health care and retirement benefits, staff policies, and other employment-related topics."
HR could finally see what employees were asking. Common questions, seasonal trends, staff productivity and open cases, from the reports and dashboards.
Cathy O'Bryan, Associate Vice President of Client Services and Support at IU, put it this way in Salesforce's story:
"It's much easier to be efficient and effective in your operation if you have a sense of what's happening, what are people asking."
Sources
IU CRM, University HR Phase I: https://crm.iu.edu/projects/completed/uhr-phase1.html
Salesforce, Indiana University customer story: https://www.salesforce.com/education/indiana-university/
IU News, John Whelan, September 27, 2017: https://news.iu.edu/live/news/24093-from-the-desk-john-whelan-shares-updates-about
IU News, John Whelan, November 7, 2018: https://news.iu.edu/live/news/25524-from-the-desk-ius-vice-president-for-human
Why I still use this one
The old way held together because experienced people held it together.
The risk was that all of it depended on who was in the building. The system was the visible ask.
Writing the work down was the real job, and it is what made the system worth building.