adp case study for tdrp - center for talent...

Carrie Beckstrom, Karen Bonn and Jim

Abbinanti in collaboration with CTR Client approval received

10/25/2014

ADP TDRp Case Study

Center for Talent Reporting or TDRp

@Center4TR

ADP TDRp Case Study Client Information .................................................................................................. 2

Company information ........................................................................................ 2

Case Study ........................................................................................................... 2

Overview ........................................................................................................... 3

Company profile ................................................................................................ 3

ADP Mission .................................................................................................. 3

ADP Vision..................................................................................................... 4

Business context ............................................................................................... 4

Business dynamics and goals........................................................................ 4

Organizational culture and dynamics ............................................................. 5

Trigger for TDRp ............................................................................................... 6

TDRp Planning Process .................................................................................... 7

TDRp Implementation ....................................................................................... 8

Barriers .......................................................................................................... 9

Enablers....................................................................................................... 10

Resources.................................................................................................... 10

Benefits, Lessons Learned .............................................................................. 11

Benefits ........................................................................................................ 11

Key Learnings .............................................................................................. 12

Best Practices .............................................................................................. 13

Version 1.0: 25-Oct-14 Developed by: Peggy Parskey

25-OCT-14 TDRP CASE STUDY: ADP PAGE 1

Client Information

Company information Company Name ADP Address One ADP Boulevard City, state, ZIP Code Roseland, New Jersey 07068 Phone number Web site address www.adp.com Industry Business Services Number of employees 52,000

Annual revenue More than $10 Billion in Fiscal 2014

Contact name Carrie Beckstrom Title Vice President Learning and Performance Phone number (925) 730-7570 E-mail address [email protected]

Function Learning and Performance (L&P)

Functional description

L&P is responsible for addressing the learning needs of ADP employees and clients world-wide in order to meet organizational-performance and business-impact objectives. Internally this entails delivering formal and informal learning solutions combined with performance consulting services to help employees excel in their jobs. Externally this includes delivering product training and consulting services to ADP clients in order to help them realize a return on their investment.

Department size 120 Centralized vs decentralized Decentralized

Fiscal Year Fiscal Year Ends June 30 Department Budget Not available for publication (NFP)

Case Study


http://www.adp.com/

Overview When Kent Barnett launched the initial Executive Council to oversee the development of Talent Development Reporting principles for the L&D function in 2010, Carrie Beckstrom, VP of Learning and Performance (L&P), was a key and influential member of the Council. When TDRp expanded beyond L&D to include all of Talent, Carrie was asked to be the Executive Council Chair. Carrie, who oversees L&P for ADP’s largest clients, is a strong believer in using standard approaches, consistent measures and enabling scalable and repeatable processes. Her organization is a long-time user of Metrics that Matter® (MTM1), leveraging its standard reporting and benchmark data to inform performance goals and improvement plans. TDRp was a natural extension of what Carrie and her team were already doing. She saw further benefit to becoming part of a broader community to learn from others, leverage best practices and be on the forefront of what she believed would be a major shift in how L&D engaged with the business. Not surprisingly, when KnowledgeAdvisors conducted its first workshop on Talent Development Reporting in June 2011, ADP was front and center in the audience.

Company profile ADP is a comprehensive global provider of cloud-based Human Capital Management (HCM) solutions that unite HR, payroll, talent, time, tax and benefits administration, and a leader in business outsourcing services, analytics and compliance expertise. ADP’s experience, deep insights, and cutting-edge technology have transformed human resources from a back-office administrative function to a strategic business advantage.

In 2014, ADP celebrated 65 years in business. The company serves 610,000 clients in 100 countries, and has offered cloud-based software for 16 years.

ADP Mission ADP’s mission is to power organizations with insightful solutions that drive business success.

1 Metrics that Matter® is a talent analytics system, combining a world-class evaluation system with powerful analytic tools to help organizations measure and improve their talent development programs. Metrics that Matter® combines data from multiple enterprise systems with information collected through evaluations and assessments to paint a complete picture of learning and business performance. The primary focus of Metrics that Matter® is to provide the analytic toolset, including reporting and comparative benchmarks, to empower data-driven decision-making and improve the return on investments in an organization’s talent.


ADP Vision

ADP’s vision is to be the world’s authority on helping organizations focus on what matters.

Business context Business dynamics and goals

• What are the key goals of VP of Learning and Performance? Develop associate HCM expertise – 100% ADP associates focused on

large clients earn HCM Basic Certificate by December 2014. 75% implementation and service associates earn HCM Intermediate by June 2015.

Standardize associate Time to Competency to 5 months Add value and increase impact of client learning experience – measure

through improvement in NPS and decrease in service requests Realize 3% productivity improvement throughout L&P

• How are the goals of L&D aligned to the business? (What is the process)? This boils down to strategic alignment and ensuring that the learning organization’s resources are allocated to the most critical needs of the business. This is accomplished through an annual strategic planning process that entails identifying learning needs associated with ADP fiscal goals. Once the learning needs are determined they are translated to L&P fiscal goals. Then, in partnership with the stakeholders, the expected impact of each learning initiative on business outcomes is defined. The learning analytics team is then responsible for identifying, reporting on and analyzing the metrics associated with the L&P goals on a monthly basis to help ensure execution on planned results.


Organizational culture and dynamics

• Describe the culture at your organization (and its impact on the implementation of TDRp) ADP is a very metrics driven culture using measurement to monitor efficiency, effectiveness and impact in their client facing operations. ADP uses a disciplined approach to drive improvement by identifying and communicating their most strategic initiatives and conducting kaizen2 sessions to identify specific process improvements. Because TDRp is focused on measures of success and the impact of L&P on key business programs, it was, conceptually speaking quite compatible with the mindset at ADP. When presented to business leaders, their initial reaction was quite positive. They were particularly positive about the shift from “learning speak” to business language and focusing not just on the internal operations of the learning function, but also its contribution to business outcomes.

• Have you observed any major shifts in the culture over the past several years? ADP, like many organizations, is faced with a changing competitive landscape, shifting client demographics and increasing technological capabilities. As such, it has focused many projects over the past several years on: Being a more agile organization Ensuring that all areas and levels of the organization focus on innovation Driving transformational rather than incremental change. As the pace of

change accelerates, the organization as a whole must demonstrate thought leadership through broader and more impactful change initiatives.

2 Kaizen is a Japanese word which means “good change”. The kaizen process has been applied in a number of industries from healthcare to government to business. When used in a business setting, kaizen refers to activities that continually improve all functions, and involves all employees from the CEO to the assembly line workers. By improving standardized activities and processes, kaizen aims to eliminate waste. (Source: Wikipedia)


Trigger for TDRp • What triggered the interest in TDRp?

As mentioned in the Overview, Carrie Beckstrom was engaged early in the development of TDRp and was a big supporter from the outset. Carrie saw TDRp as a way to ‘get ahead of the curve’ and implement a process that would provide value not only to L&P but to the business as well. The opportunity to glean best practices from others, to help evolve, use and improve measurement and reporting standards was a compelling value proposition for Carrie.

• What did ADP hope to accomplish as a result of the training and subsequent certification? As a long time user of MTM®, ADP had come a long way in its development and use of efficiency and effectiveness measures. Reports from their existing systems (both their LMS and MTM) provided them with sufficient data to demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of their programs and the function as a whole. A gap for Carrie’s organization was the ability to demonstrate a credible link between L&P programs and business outcomes. Carrie saw TDRp as a vehicle to close that gap and build an even stronger partnership with business leaders.

• What did you see as critical success factors for the effort? One TDRp success factor was having Carrie Beckstrom not only sponsor

the effort, but take on a visible role in its implementation. Carrie’s presence at key business meetings and her involvement with the team sent the message to the business that this new process was a key priority for L&P.

As with any effort, ADP recognized the importance of allocating resources to execute on the day-to-day tasks to take TDRp over the finish line. Carrie assigned Jim Abbinanti to be accountable for implementing TDRp and made it an explicit part of his role. When Karen Bonn joined the team, she was also held accountable for successful execution of the project.

Finally, beyond L&P sponsorship and resources, Carrie recognized that business leader sponsorship was essential if TDRp was to become an established and sustainable process within L&P. Gaining traction with a few key business leaders would enable Carrie and her team to demonstrate the power of the process and then drive adoption in other parts of the business.


TDRp Planning Process

• When did the implementation effort start? ADP attended the first workshop at KnowledgeAdvisors in June 2011. They began their implementation in earnest later that year with a focus on creating awareness of the process, understanding the approach and establishing buy-in for adopting the TDRp framework.

• Who is involved in the planning and implementation of TDRp? From the outset, Carrie oversaw the TDRp effort and served as Executive Sponsor. Additionally, she asked Jim Abbinanti, the Manager of Learning Evaluation and Business Impact to work with her on implementation. Because Jim was responsible for the oversight of MTM, he was a natural to drive the implementation of TDRp within ADP. When the organization later centralized the measurement effort under Karen Bonn, Director of Tools and Technology, Karen became a third member of the TDRp implementation team. Eventually, Boris Ntwoku, who had deep expertise in analytics and statistical analysis, became the 4th member of the team. Karen and Boris’ focus was to enhance the technology and analysis capabilities of ADP’s TDRp effort.

• Was senior company leadership involved? If so, how? At the outset, the TDRp framework and benefits were discussed with key

senior leaders to ensure buy-in. Thereafter these leaders aided the effort by providing a forum through which the reports and recommended actions could be shared on a periodic basis.

In addition, several senior leaders were selected to serve as early adopters and executive sponsors of specific learning programs.

Carrie also engaged her peers, other learning VPs throughout ADP, to socialize TDRp and report on

• Was a project plan created? Jim and Carrie developed an initial project plan using a template provided by the Center for Talent Reporting. The original time span for the project was targeted at 12 months but as with other organizations, the effort took longer than anticipated. The biggest time commitment was the development of business outcomes and getting agreement with the business on the impact. As mentioned earlier, the implementation of TDRp was focused on the L&P organization for the division that supports large clients. The primary area of focus was reporting key business outcomes and L&P impact.


TDRp Implementation • Describe how you navigated the TDRp implementation process: To what

extent did you iterate within the process (e.g. measures library, statements, reports) On some level, ADP’s implementation felt very linear moving from “station to station” as Jim phrased it. Carrie focused on the strategic aspect of the process while Jim focused on the tactical implementation including getting access to the data and populating the statements and reports. That said, the TDRp process at ADP was also very iterative since “nothing is perfect right out of the gate.” Neither Carrie nor Jim let that impede their progress; they continued to modify and improve the measures library and statements/reports as they met with key stakeholders and sponsors. In many ways, Carrie and Jim felt that, of necessity, they needed to use an agile process. An agile methodology is an iterative development approach where requirements and solutions evolve through collaboration between self-organizing cross-functional teams. At ADP, Jim noted, “Everyone was learning at the same time. We were learning how well our message was getting across and if we had to reeducate our stakeholders. We were also learning about the methodology itself and how to appropriately represent measures on the statements and reports. And finally, the senior leaders had to adjust to the statements and reports. So, ultimately, we continued to iterate while at the same time moving forward.”

• What organizational dynamics did you face during the implementation? ADP was fortunate in that they didn’t face any major changes that impacted their implementation. For ADP, it was a top-down process driven by Carrie. Because Carrie was such a strong sponsor, and leadership within L&P during this period was stable, they were able to proceed ahead without any additional hurdles.

• What level of resources were required to implement TDRp? The implementation of TDRp required approximately 1 FTE throughout the life of the project consisting of Jim and Carrie’s time as well as the time from SMEs and analysts who provided data for the statements and reports. Carrie, as the executive sponsor, and Jim, as the TDRp practitioner, were engaged throughout and met monthly to review progress and make course corrections. When Karen Bonn joined, Jim and Karen together met monthly with Carrie to ensure that progress continued to be made.


Now that TDRp has been fully implemented and is in a continuous improvement cycle, the level of support required has dropped to ~ 1/3 of an FTE. A large part of this ongoing effort would have occurred regardless since data collection and reporting provided key inputs for managing L&P. However, instead of creating a myriad of reports in different formats, these combined resources now create TDRp reports that provide a professional and consistent look and feel to their reporting.

Barriers

• Describe the barriers you encountered during the implementation Fortunately, the ADP team felt that they didn’t encounter huge barriers that impeded their progress. Technology was, and continues to be, an issue in that there is no end-to-end automated process for gathering the data and automating the reports. To simplify the TDRp process, Jim and Carrie modified the statements and reports slightly. While still conforming to the TDRp standards, they made adjustments such as: Adding prior year data for more than one year back to see trends and help

inform goals for the current fiscal year. Documenting the owner for key measures. This information ensured that

an accountable person was named for key measures while also providing a point of contact should questions arise.

Simplifying the program report to conform more to the look and feel of the Summary and Operations report.

Adding hyperlinks between statements and reports to simplify the data entry process and reduce data entry errors.

• An additional barrier was that the L&P organization had a more sophisticated approach to measurement than some of their business counterparts. And as L&P adopted TDRp and identified new areas for exploration (see the later discussion “Time to Competency and NPS”), their measurement maturity accelerated. This situation required that L&P continually educate the business to help advance their own measurement maturity.


Enablers

• What factors contributed to your success (consider resources, sponsorship, business environment) When Karen Bonn joined the team, Jim felt that the added resource and ‘set of eyes’ enabled ADP to make progress at a faster rate. In addition, when their team added Boris Ntwoku as its data scientist, he became an ‘unofficial’ 4th member of the team. Jim recommends that organizations consider creating a TDR team and task force. In particular, beyond having strong sponsorship and being driven from the top, he recommends that organizations include on their team: A technology person to help aggregate data or automate the data

gathering process An analyst to review statements and reports and provide insights and

actions to drive continuous improvement and impact

The fact that L&P already had a solid strategic alignment process and performance consulting practice in place at the time TDRp was adopted also contributed to their success. In order to fully realize the benefits of TDRp, it is essential that learning organizations are directly aligned to the overall goals of the business and have the consulting expertise required to ensure business outcome measures for each learning program are clearly established and agreed upon on the frontend of projects.

Resources Leveraged from CTR

• What CTR resources did you leverage (people, tools, templates)? Dave Vance and Peggy Parskey from CTR CTR Collateral including:

♦ White Papers ♦ Presentations ♦ Excel templates ♦ Measures Library ♦ Assessment Worksheet ♦ Definition of Terms ♦ Implementation Guidance documents


• In retrospect, what resources would you have liked to have available? Because ADP was an early adopter, many of the resources listed in the question above were not yet developed. The team acknowledged that, looking back, they would have benefited from having all of this documentation and collateral available from the start.

Leveraged from others

• What non-CTR resources did you employ? Metrics that Matter® (MTM) Excel Logic Models

• Describe how these tools aided your planning and/or implementation

process MTM played a huge role in reporting effectiveness metrics. Excel was the primary tool for statement and report creation, developing

and updating their Metrics Library as well as their project plan, logic model and data analysis.

Logic Models were used to drive the detailed conversations for determining metrics, particularly for strategic programs. The logic model framework provided structure to identifying both L&P impact measures as well as business outcome measures.

Benefits, Lessons Learned Benefits

• What benefits has ADP achieved as a result of implementing TDRp? ADP has realized several benefits from implementing TDRp: Implementing TDRp has led to more meaningful discussions with

stakeholders about the contribution of learning programs to business outcomes.

Data is better organized since the process has forced a more consistent process and structure of the output.

For their strategic projects, the metrics team now has a more consistent process in working with project leads. Jim works with the leads to help them develop the program report which in turn is necessitating that the PMs have more strategic conversations with the stakeholders.

Insights we have gained from the analysis of our statements and reports have enhanced our ability to provide actionable information to the business.


The reports, which are modeled after financial statements, enable us to effectively communicate our progress and impact to executives on a regular basis.

And the monthly forecasting and reporting drives accountability and continuous improvement.

• Do you feel that these benefits are unique to ADP or could be achieved by others? At CTR and other industry events Jim has had conversations with members of other organizations who have expressed similar challenges and barriers that ADP has faced. Based on these conversations, Jim believes the benefits of TDRp are obtainable by all organizations. The specific benefits achieved will most likely vary by organization based on their measurement maturity level.

Key Learnings

• What were your key learnings from your TDRp implementation? Awareness/Understanding: Although Carrie socialized TDRp at various

levels of L&P, there was a need to re-communicate several times to different audiences. Educating stakeholders on the benefit of engaging L&P in dialog around business outcomes and L&P impact was challenging because many had not previously measured the impact of learning. On the plus side, the team encountered several stakeholders who openly embraced TDRp and cooperated fully.

Planning: ADP’s TDRp planning has been yearly. Some aspects of planning are dependent on annual goals, but other areas can be planned further out.

Implementation (data analysis and decision making): The original focus in the beginning was too linear, concentrating on metrics, statement/report design, and data gathering. The real value of TDRp is using the data to run L&P like a business and not just report L&D like a business. Resources were one reason for this in the beginning. Once additional team members were onboard, Jim and Carrie were able to quickly progress up the maturity model.

Implementation (L&P’s impact on the business): This is an ongoing challenge for many organizations, and to a large extent, success can vary by project. For some initiatives, the L&P impact is clear while for others, L&P is one piece of a large multi-organizational effort where specific impact is extremely difficult to define. Also, the nature of L&P projects are often considered 'essential' (ex. product training) making it difficult to identify an isolated expected impact.


Implementation (secure data from external sources): Since beginning the TDRp implementation in 2011, ADP's analytical capabilities have matured quickly. This has enabled better data access for L&P

Infrastructure: Too much time was spent on the manual effort to produce monthly statements and reports. Although ADP did not let technology challenges become a roadblock to implementing TDRp, the team could have benefitted from addressing its technology infrastructure needs earlier in the process, especially given the many and/or complex systems housing required data.

Best Practices

• Please identify 1-3 best practices acquired during the course of this work, ideally practices that others could adopt

One of the strategic projects within ADP was launching their ADP Vantage HCM product and simultaneously deploying an updated implementation methodology and service initiative. L&P was charged with lowering the ramp up time for implementation consultants and project managers . They embarked on a time to competency project to reduce the time to ramp up these associates from the established baseline. They created a 360o process to assess competency at 3 specific time intervals: after the completion of the newly-designed onboarding program, and at 3 and 6 months on-the-job. L&P is now able to report on time to competency as a business outcome measure to demonstrate how changes to onboarding accelerated time to competency. This measure became a proxy for a key business outcome measure – Time to Revenue Recognition – that could now be included on TDRp Summary Reports. In addition, as a result of the decreased time to associate productivity, cost savings were realized as well.


• Did you create any tools or resources that you can share with others? Excel-based statements/reports. ADP leveraged the existing templates

from the CTR website, but added logic and macros to the worksheets to ♦ Minimize or eliminate duplicate data entry ♦ Reduce data entry errors ♦ Simplify the overall process of creating the TDRp outputs.

Logic Model format

• What is your favorite story or insights that you’d like to share with others? ADP has three examples that demonstrate the power of TDRp to enhance the organization’s measurement maturity. Time to competency project

♦ As ADP started developing the statements and reports, they realized that one key measure focused on “time to revenue recognition”, that is, the point at which a new client signs on with ADP to the point where they are fully implemented and can be billed regularly for services.

♦ Because time to revenue recognition was in part due to the ramp time of newly hired associates, the team concluded that ‘time to competency’ would be a solid proxy measure for ‘time to revenue recognition.’

♦ The resulting process to compute time to competency enabled ADP leaders to identify where they could significantly alter their onboarding approach and reduce the time it takes for new associates to become competent to oversee an implementation effort.

♦ As a result of this project, the ADP team estimates that they have saved the company ~$6.3 Million.

A second story relates to measuring Net Promoter Score (NPS). As the TDRp team had discussions with senior leaders, it became clear that one key measure was the extent to which they could influence NPS. These discussions triggered another project to examine the key drivers of this important measure. ♦ Carrie charged Boris Ntwoku, their newly hired data scientist, with

examining the causal relationships among numerous input variables and NPS.

♦ Using a sophisticated approach (Structural Equation Modeling), Boris identified several factors where L&P contributed to the NPS score.

♦ The team is using these findings to highlight L&P’s contribution to improving NPS in discussions with business leaders and execute on actions which are most likely to result in improved NPS scores.


Finally, the ADP team applied for the Learning Elite award in both 2013 (ranked #29) and 2014 (ranked #8). Feedback from the judges has explicitly cited ADP’s disciplined measurement process, as embodied by TDRp, as key differentiator of their application. ♦ Below are quotes from the judges on their 2013 submission

» “Very impressive submission. I was particularly impressed with the extensive use of metrics and the “maniacal” focus on alignment with business priorities and outcomes. Thank you for the work you have done in implementing TDRp practices in your operation. This is a great example to all learning leaders of the value we could demonstrate if we all embraced such a focused and analytical approach to measuring success.”

» “I was very impressed by ADP’s use of the Talent Development Reporting Principles (TDRp) and the work they have done with Bersin. The recognition of the need and subsequent accomplishment of the shift toward more business strategy and less operational support is noteworthy. Very nice use of metrics to monitor and report on learning Effectiveness, Efficiency and Outcomes - especially the specific identification of lead and lag indicators. Finally, the role Carrie Beckstrom has assumed in championing the TDRp principles and encouraging others in the L&D community to adopt them is refreshing. Excellent work!”

♦ Below are quotes from the judges on their 2014 submission

» “ADP’s application is extremely impressive, and it is difficult to highlight one single elite tactic. However, I believe their use of and standards for measurement as well as co-founding the Talent Development Reporting Principles (TDRP) nonprofit lend credence to ADP’s L&D and provide an excellent opportunity to advance L&D as an organization and within the broader learning community.”

» “Three items really stand out to me: the in-depth involvement of executives in the learning and development process, their Career Driver platform, and TDRp. The creation of the non-profit focused on Talent Development Reporting Principles (TDRP) is noteworthy and seems to be making an impact broader than the applicant’s business alone.”


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