The Clients

StepStone – a European leader in the provision of Talent Management Solutions

RBS - one of the UK’s largest Banking Groups

Balfour Beatty – the UK’s leading construction and Engineering Group

The RBS Requirements

In November 2007, StepStone contacted us to ask if we could help them with the implementation of their “i-GRasp” e-Recruitment system into their largest enterprise client, the Royal Bank of Scotland. StepStone had just finished the first phase of a demanding implementation programme and RBS were using i-GRasp to manage their high volume recruitment campaigns in the UK. However, StepStone’s then Project Manager had just resigned on the eve of the next phase – the implementation of i-GRasp for recruiting senior and professional hires. RBS had their own well resourced IT project team delivering the project on behalf of their internal HR customers. StepStone urgently needed help with managing the next phase of this project. Managing senior client and stake-holder relationships within a complex and multi-layered client base were as critical as developing and managing a robust project plan from design to go-live.

What we did for StepStone/RBS

We worked with StepStone and RBS’s project team and their internal HR customers to assess the state of play thus far; including a full analysis of the risks and issues facing the project. We then provided the necessary project management and client relationship management over the next 9 months and ensured a successful system go-live in the summer of 2008. During this period RBS made a number of changes to their business and user requirements and these changes had to be assessed and managed to ensure appropriate approvals and budget were agreed and to ensure the development/configuration of appropriate Applications, databases and interfaces. These included the addition of new RBS businesses and user groups and the development and up-grading of interfaces with RBS’s core PeopleSoft HR system.

Throughout the first half of 2008, StepStone continued to win major enterprise wide contracts and following the successful RBS “go-live”, they asked us if we would take over the management of a new enterprise wide project for the Construction Group, Balfour Beatty. At the time, Balfour Beatty was StepStone’s second biggest client behind RBS.

The Balfour Beatty Requirements

Balfour Beatty presented a very different scenario to that provided by RBS and as a consequence some very different risks and issues had to be addressed. Fore mostly Balfour Beatty is a highly devolved organisation with some 23 different operating businesses and from a resourcing perspective, competing businesses. Their very part time project manager was a senior HR Director not a specialist project manager; they had no IT representative on their project team that consisted of a HR representative from each operating business – each with their own particular recruitment needs. The main requirement they all had in common was to protect their candidate’s details from one another until and unless, they were ready to share them.

What we did for StepStone/Balfour Beatty

Our main challenges ware therefore to persuade and help Balfour Beatty establish a workable project organisation; to provide project management support for them as clients in addition to managing the project on behalf of StepStone as the vendor; to coach them on the resources they would need to move the project forward and to help them balance the need for effective decision making at the hub of the project with the need to consult the different operating business that the project was ultimately supposed to be supporting. We also had to work very closely with both Balfour Beatty and StepStone’s functional and technical team to find a way of resolving the need to initially ring fence candidates and to then enable designated candidates to be shared across a common talent pool.

During this period our consultant developed and managed various project plans; liaised with RBS and Balfour Beatty clients and stake-holders on behalf of StepStone; provided HR subject matter expertise; and managed StepStone’s functional and technical resources.