Northern Ireland Civil Service
HR Connect Programme
The Northern Ireland Civil Service (NICS) is undergoing an unprecedented period of change and modernisation. The challenge for the NICS is to deliver excellent public services now and in the future. To meet this challenge, NICS is changing to harness technology, build skills and develop a way of working that fits with the modern and changing world.(source: Dept. of Finance and Personnel website).
The twelve departments that make up the Northern Ireland Civil Service and the Northern Ireland Office employ over 27,000 staff. In the past, HR services were provided by each individual department, and it was determined that this resulted in inefficiencies and a significant duplication of efforts across the departments. The NICS and the NIO awarded a contract to an alliance led by Fujitsu Services to design and build a shared HR service, called HR Connect.
An online HR service based on the Oracle eBusiness Suite (HRMS) would be established, allowing staff to access information and interact with HR online. Day-to-day administrative tasks would be carried out by the Shared Service Centre, but policy and decision-making would continue to reside with HR specialist staff within the departments. This represented a significant change to the ways of working, and presented a challenge to provide communications and training to all 27,000+ staff.
Initially, it was envisioned that training on the online system and the new service would be delivered to all staff and management in a classroom environment. The NICS had experienced difficulty with takeup on eLearning projects in the past, and expressed a clear preference for classroom training, but changes to the way services would roll out to the departments (in stages, rather than all-at-once) would have resulted in the need to train the 27,000+ managers and staff in five separate events over the course of two years. This was considered to be untenable, due to the substantially increased costs and man-days that would be lost by the civil service.
4G's Managing Director, Suzannah Crowell Green, (in her role as Lead Solutions Architect for Fujitsu) was brought onto the project to devise a more cost-effective solution. She proposed a blended mix of training interventions to include classroom training as well as eLearning, after demonstrating to the HR Directors and senior Programme Management that new technology could make eLearning interactive, relevant, and an efficient way to train users.
The client agreed that this would be an effective method of training delivery, and Suzannah led one of the most ambitious eLearning projects in recent history, including the development of over 350 lessons and associated Step-by-step guides and the delivery of classroom events to over 8,000 managers, HR staff, and Super Users.
In appreciation for her extraordinary efforts on this Programme, Suzannah was awarded Fujitsu's prestigious VIP Gold Award for Outstanding Service in December of 2008. In the light of the unprecedented success of this as well as a number of subsequent eLearning projects, we were successful in headhunting Suzannah to join us as our Managing Director, bringing a wealth of experience and industry expertise to the team.
4G's close working relationship with Fujitsu Services began on the NICS project, and we provided several instructional designers, eLearning developers, classroom trainers, and logistics support staff to the project.
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