Strategic Roadmaps: Guiding Your Path to Success

Align your workforce management and business strategies to stay on course

Background

In today’s ever-evolving business environment, an organization’s ability to respond to change is

critical to ongoing success. Shifting economic conditions, disruptive technologies, leadership changes,

mergers and acquisitions, and other factors continue to create new opportunities and threats that

influence your ability to stay competitive and profitable. Executives and other business leaders are

responsible for guiding their organizations through these changes with new business strategies

that directly affect employees and how they are managed.

Business leaders need to set direction and provide a clear path to meeting workforce management

goals that align with evolving business strategies. Whether your organization will be introducing

new products, expanding into new global markets, or streamlining operations to reduce costs, it is

crucial that your workforce management technology continues to support your business strategies

and empower your employees and managers to drive results.

What steps should you take to help ensure this ongoing alignment? Will you need to automate

more workforce management functions or support additional languages? Will you need to rethink

your system deployment method? Will you need training and communications to manage change and

drive user adoption? A strategic roadmap can help your organization effectively plan for change

so you can achieve ongoing excellence with your workforce management system.

What kinds of trigger events drive changes in an organization’s business strategies?

• New or expanded regulations

• Shifting competitive landscape

• Heightened financial risk

• New ownership or leadership

• Economic changes

• Industry trends

• Innovation

• Disruptive technology

Navigating changing business conditions

Business leaders are tasked with successfully guiding their organizations through a constantly changing business landscape. Some changes create new opportunities to grow the business, enter new markets, or improve performance. For example, disruptive technology may enable you to introduce new products or services. Growth in overseas markets may create ideal conditions for global expansion. Or new corporate ownership may choose to restructure the business for increased agility and effectiveness.

Other changes present threats or challenges that require strategic action to minimize potential risk. New labor laws and regulations may create increasingly complex compliance requirements. A slowing economy may force you to consolidate or streamline operations. Or widespread security breaches may cause your organization to re-evaluate its system deployment methods.

When business leaders respond to opportunities and threats with new business strategies, it is important to understand how these strategies will affect employees across the organization. After all, your people — and the processes and technology used to manage them — are critical to successful strategy execution. A strategic roadmap can help your organization stay focused on workforce management initiatives that support current business strategies and drive achievement of corporate goals.

In the fourth quarter of 2015, the S&P 500 companies, which account for about 80% of market capitalization, experienced their first revenue and earnings decline since 2008/2009.1 This downturn undoubtedly led many companies to rethink their business strategies.

Changes in Business Strategy

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Roadmap Equation

Changing business strategies affect your employees and the processes and technology used to manage them. A strategic roadmap can help your organization stay focused on workforce management initiatives that support current business strategies and drive achievement of corporate goals.

Roadmap Equation

Let a strategic roadmap be your guide

A strategic roadmap should be considered a long-range plan for aligning your workforce management and business strategies. A strategic roadmap:

• Gives executives a clear and concise path with actionable items to help ensure your workforce management technology is optimized to support your current business strategy

• Provides direction that helps business leaders navigate from point A to point B by laying out the steps, sequence, timing, and budget required to get there

• Offers a blueprint that leaders can use to socialize and educate others in the organization

• Serves as a living document that keeps the organization grounded and focused on successful execution of business and technology plans

2015 was the biggest year ever for mergers and acquisitions.2 How does this explosive M&A activity affect employees and the processes and technology used to manage them?

Ideally, a strategic roadmap should be part of your organization’s ongoing business and/or technology planning process. To help ensure continuous strategic alignment and keep the organization on the right track, you may want to consider building a roadmap process into your quarterly business review. This will allow you to make roadmap adjustments to support any pressing business initiatives that may surface over the course of the fiscal year.

The Importance of Executive Sponsorship

An actively engaged executive sponsor helps drive successful strategic roadmap execution by:

Communicating the strategic importance of roadmap milestones

Building initial buy-in and support from key stakeholders

Removing roadblocks and resolving issues to keep projects on track

Adding resources and intervening on escalated issues when necessary

Championing roadmap projects from initiation to completion3

According to a Project Management Institute study, 81% of organizations that are highly effective at managing organizational change had engaged executive sponsors.4

Building an effective strategic roadmap

Developing an effective strategic roadmap starts by understanding your business strategy, its effects on the workforce, and the technology changes required to support successful strategy execution. Once these fundamentals are in place, your organization is ready to start building a strategic roadmap with the support of an executive sponsor by taking the following steps:

1. Assemble your roadmap framework, which may include multiple projects, to change or advance your workforce management system

2. Define the steps, sequence, and timing of initiatives required to align your workforce management strategy with your business strategy and reach your stated goals

3. Define the business benefits associated with each roadmap milestone

4. Formulate the budget by determining the products, services, and resources needed to support your roadmap

5. Incorporate checkpoints to assess and validate progress along your journey

Once your framework is established, you can incorporate new or different projects into the roadmap over time based on changing business needs or initiatives.

Cloud Migration• Cloud ROI Analysis• Cloud Readiness• Actual Migration & Upgrade• State-of-the-Art Cloud• Refocus ITResources• $XX,XXX

Analytics Rollout• Strategic KPIs• Simplified, Standardized• Enterprisewide View

of Labor• $XX,XXX

MultinationalDeployment

• Global Design• Localization• Country Complexity• Languages• Application Footprint• Pilot Deployment Strategy• $XX,XXX

Platform Consolidation• Application Footprint• Configuration Comparison• Rule Standardization• Integration Considerations• User Adoption Plan• Single Source for Information• Share Employees Across Enterprise• $XX,XXX

An effective strategic roadmap outlines the steps, sequence, and timing of projects; the business benefits of each initiative; and the budget required to achieve each milestone along your path to success.

Sample Strategic Roadmap2-Year Executive Plan

How UKG can help

When you shift your business strategy in response to market changes, UKG™ (Ultimate Kronos Group) can provide vision, direction, and expertise to help you:

• Understand the impact on your employees and your UKG workforce management system

• Develop a strategic roadmap to align your workforce management system with your current business strategy

A UKG Strategic Roadmap™ provides an executive-level plan to guide your organization through well-defined and carefully sequenced steps designed to advance your workforce management solution within an established time frame and budget.

Developing an effective strategic roadmap starts by understanding your business strategy, its effects on the workforce, and the technology changes required to support successful strategy execution.

Based on industry best practices and decades of experience working with leading organizations, UKG has developed proven templates for common workforce management system projects that can serve as building blocks for designing your roadmap. Some of our most popular roadmaps include:

• Cloud migration: Reviews, prepares, and moves your on-premises UKG solution to the UKG Cloud so your IT staff is free to focus on other corporate priorities

• Platform consolidation: Standardizes processes, policies, and technology by combining separate UKG database instances used across the organization into a single database instance used enterprisewide

• Workforce realignment: Reviews business processes, technical infrastructure, and applications to see where improvements can be made to support strategic objectives either by optimizing an on-premises system or moving an aging or poorly maintained system to the UKG Cloud

• Multinational deployment: Extends deployment of your UKG solution to two or more countries, taking into consideration globalization, languages, in-country complexities, compliance requirements, application footprint, user access, and more

• User adoption: Assesses organizational readiness for change and provides role-based communication and education to increase user adoption rates and maximize return on your UKG investment

UKG can also develop customer-specific roadmap building blocks to meet your unique strategic requirements.

Why YOU must act

What YOU are doing

How UKG gets YOU there

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Using a proven process, UKG works in close partnership with customers to develop a strategic roadmap that helps align their workforce management processes and technology with evolving business strategies to achieve their corporate goals.

When you need a strategic roadmap for navigating business change, it makes sense to partner with the world’s leading workforce management solution provider. Leveraging our understanding of your workforce, technology, and evolving goals and requirements, the UKG team of experts will develop a UKG Strategic Roadmap to guide you along the path to success, delivering the experience you expect and helping you achieve smart value fast.

Learn more about the benefits of a UKG Strategic Roadmap.

UKG Strategic Roadmap Fit

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About UKG

At UKG (Ultimate Kronos Group), our purpose is people™. Built from a merger that created one of the largest cloud

companies in the world, UKG believes organizations succeed when they focus on their people. As a leading global

provider of HCM, payroll, HR service delivery, and workforce management solutions, UKG delivers award-winning Pro,

Dimensions, and Ready solutions to help tens of thousands of organizations across geographies and in every industry

drive better business outcomes, improve HR effectiveness, streamline the payroll process, and help make work a better,

more connected experience for everyone. UKG has more than 12,000 employees around the globe and is known for an

inclusive workplace culture. The company has earned numerous awards for culture, products, and services, including

consecutive years on Fortune’s 100 Best Companies to Work For list. To learn more, visit ukg.com.

References:

1. Wolf Richter, So Just How Bad is the Revenue and Earnings Recession?, Wolf Street (February 1, 2016), found at http://wolfstreet.com/2016/02/01/how-bad-is-corporate-revenue-earnings-recession/.

2. Maureen Farrell, 2015 Becomes the Biggest M&A Year Ever, The Wall Street Journal (December 3, 2015), found at http://www.wsj.com/articles/2015-becomes-the-biggest-m-a-year-ever-1449187101.

3. Project Management Institute, Executive Sponsor Management: Top Driver of Project and Program Success, October 2014, at 11.

4. Project Management Institute, Enabling Organizational Change through Strategic Initiatives, March 2014, at 5.