Transforming Business Operations

UKG is one of the world’s leading human capital management (HCM) cloud companies. Its AI-powered HR, payroll, workforce management and culture solutions provide 80,000 organizations around the globe and across industries the opportunity to become great places to work.

UKG formed in 2020 when Ultimate Software, a leader in HR and payroll, and Kronos, a leader in workforce management, merged. While the two award-winning cultures came together, countless systems operated separately, with two instances of everything from sales and customer service systems to billing and finance applications.

To meet customer needs, operate efficiently, and reduce costs, UKG embarked on a multi-year system integration project, “UKG 1.” The project involved more than 1,000 individuals including many in IT, and required unifying systems, redesigning processes, managing terabytes of data, and leading thousands of employees through change.

Integrating the Prosci Methodology Into the Project Plan

At the time that UKG’s Prosci Certified Change Practitioners were undertaking this massive digital transformation initiative, the company had 12,000 employees spread across North America, Latin America, EMEA and Asia Pacific, and most would be impacted by UKG 1. The system integration would also impact countless people across UKG’s customers and partners that interact with UKG, in varying degrees outside of simply using UKG solutions.

Working closely with the project management team, UKG change practitioners set forth on a mission to help transform business operations at the company. “UKG 1 is not only a systems and technology integration project,” says Vanessa Nedvins, Director, Strategic Business Operations at UKG. “It’s also about integrating people and the day-to-day business processes they drive.”

Assessing Project Impacts

Change practitioners first needed to understand the current state of the application environment of the merged companies to understand impacts. They assessed business processes across the company, like lead-to-order, billing and invoicing, and sales compensation.

These processes were supported by dozens of standalone applications, many of them duplicates due to the merging of the two companies. UKG would replace these with an integrated system, with Salesforce Revenue Cloud at its core. The change practitioner impact assessments also revealed the extensive upstream and downstream impacts of the systems operating in these individual functional areas.

Applying Change Management

Using the Prosci Methodology to guide their course, change practitioners applied change management broadly on the UKG 1 project, plus separately in each business area to help those individuals prepare for and adopt the new integrated system. They engaged sponsors, conducted ADKAR^® Assessments and Risk Assessments, and much more. Interestingly, Nedvins and her team minimized the potential negative impacts of introducing another framework to the organization by building change capability and applying it organically under the radar. “This organic approach made the whole change process more manageable and effective,” she adds.

Importantly, they integrated the ADKAR Model into their activities, focusing on the five outcomes individuals need to achieve for the change to be successful: Awareness, Desire, Knowledge, Ability and Reinforcement. Besides working closely with the IT project management team, they partnered with communication and training efforts to engage with the business based on ADKAR. They leveraged hundreds of training components, which included enterprise-wide and role-based live instruction, self-paced training, and supporting materials.

They also empowered people managers, who Prosci research reveals are critical to project success. Practitioners equipped them for their change roles and provided them materials such as “Meetings in a Box,” so managers could effectively support their teams with the right information at the right time to move through the change. A network of functional readiness leads also played an important role in implementing change management practices that supported the UKG 1 initiative, plus they kept the Strategic Business Operations team informed about anticipated changes. A UKG 1 Champions Program recognized and rewarded “U Krewers” going the extra mile to help make the change happen, with rewards such as one-of-a-kind artwork.

“By following the ADKAR Model, we’re seeing the individual transformations. People are wrapping their heads around what they need to do to adopt these system integration changes."

— Vanessa Nedvins, Director, Strategic Business Operations

Results

Elevating the Organization

Since the merger, UKG has grown to over 15,000 employees to support customer growth. UKG was recently named one of the World’s Most Innovative Companies of 2024 by Fast Company, a distinction that celebrates organizations that lead their fields and are changing the world.

Changes overall continue to have a positive impact on the company, due in part to UKG’s dedicated business readiness team. “The Prosci Methodology today is such a big part of the fabric of our team’s engagement model when we support the various business functions in the organization,” says Nedvins. “It is just how we do business.”

UKG 1 Delivers on its Mission

The first phases of system integrations are complete, and the UKG 1 project is on course to reach the finish line sometime next year. But the benefits of the fully integrated end-to-end solution are unfolding. At 45 days after go-live, project tracking revealed some compelling adoption metrics: 56,301 users had logged into the UKG Community platform for customers. This represents significant positive change.

By unifying how UKG operates, employees are able to efficiently and consistently attract, service and support UKG customers while delivering exceptional customer experiences. The business is able to accelerate revenue growth through, among other things, access to accurate, measurable, forecastable data.

Change Management Beyond UKG 1

Besides their work on the UKG 1 project, Nedvins and her team—who are all Prosci Certified—bring other strategic initiatives to life within the organization, incorporating the Prosci Methodology into the project plans. “Any large project that impacts more than half of the business and is transformational in nature includes change management via our Operational Readiness methodology,” says Nedvins. “It’s baked right in. And because of Prosci, we know what questions to ask, we know what the impacts will be, and we know where their barrier points are. It’s allowed us to make major shifts in some of the work we do, which leads to better results on our critical initiatives.”

Working closely with business and technology leaders as well as end users in the various business areas, the team leverages the same change management strategies established in the UKG 1 project, making improvements along the way with each project. For example, change practitioners in the Strategic Business Operations team are partnering with Human Resources over the next year to implement additional solutions within the UKG product suite.

Looking Ahead

After managing the complexities of the merger during a global pandemic and undertaking a massive system integration project, the company with the tagline, “Our purpose is people” is surging forward to achieve its larger business goals through its important change initiatives. “We’re simplifying the way we do business, enabling the best customer and employee experience possible, and making sure that our suite of products gives our customers exactly what they need,” says Nedvins.

Culturally, the transition to a more change-ready organization continues to advance. “We’ve witnessed many individuals going from mosquitoes buzzing around resisting change, to mavericks embracing and even leading change,” says Nedvins. “Thought processes and mindsets are changing, which is always a good thing.”