You’ve worked hard to implement UKG Dimensions, but even though your implementation has ended, the changes coming your way have not. You’ll need to respond to business and policy changes and accept ongoing UKG releases and updates.

Many UKG customers struggle to maintain their UKG solution amidst all this change and fail to implement a process for effectively managing these requests. All too often, they make changes directly to their production UKG environment resulting in a series of unintended consequences.

The solution to these problems is to ensure that changes to your production UKG environment are managed and implemented using a process known as IT Change Management.

What is IT Change Management?

IT Change Management is a formalized process that makes it easier for your organization to roll out changes to your UKG solution. It’s a process, or collection of discrete activities that help you consider, agree, and deploy changes to your WFM ecosystem as easily, quickly, and cheaply as possible while effectively managing risk.

Why You Need IT Change Management

Unfortunately, the need to make constant changes to your WFM, HCM, and Payroll systems is an unavoidable reality in today’s business landscape. Those changes can be:

With a clear understanding of your Early Access window and PRD release dates, you must also have a clearly defined plan and approach for testing.

• Proactive – adopting new features, new policies, or process improvements that add value to your organization through cost-savings or increased efficiency.
• Reactive – resolving configuration issues/errors or external influences such as legal actions, compliance, or vendor timelines.

The need to make a change to your UKG solution can arise from:

• Changes in labor law
• Federal and state tax compliance
• Union contract changes/additions
• Changes to paid FMLA and sick leave
• Updates to unemployment taxes, workers compensation, and benefits
• New geo-locations (mergers & acquisitions)
• COVID related business changes
• New UKG releases and updates

Unfortunately, the timing of these changes is not always under your control. You may be required to release under expedited and inconvenient timelines. Each change can create new errors, introduce new defects, and break existing functionality, leading to business disruption and mistakes in your employee’s paychecks.

Benefits of Effective IT Change Management

IT Change Management safeguards your organization against any of these unnecessary errors.

In addition to minimizing the impact of disruptions to your business and employees, there are a number of benefits:

• Implement changes more quickly
• Optimize IT and business risk exposure
• Minimize the severity of any impact/disruption
• Improve transparency and communication with stakeholders
• Easily track the rollout of any changes if something goes wrong
• Implement changes the first time (without the need to rollback or rework)

Additionally, the lack of adequate IT Change Management documentation can often be a major stumbling point in internal and external compliance audits.

Creating an Effective IT Change Management Process

An effective IT Change Management process ensures that all changes to your UKG solution are assessed, documented, approved, implemented, and reviewed in a controlled way.

There are several IT Change Management process steps you should follow. These include:

• Formally requesting a change (also known as a “Request for Change” or ‘RFC’)
• Reviewing any requested changes
• Approving any requested changes
• Documenting a detailed description of the changes
• Planning or scheduling the implementation of changes
• Testing the changes to ensure they function correctly and do not adversely affect existing functionality or employees
• Assessing and reporting on the results of the changes

Summary

You don’t have to struggle to make ongoing changes and maintain your UKG solution. With an effective UKG IT Change Management process in place, you can safeguard your organization against unnecessary errors and enable your business to move faster with confidence.