Listen to part 1 of our podcast with Justin Leader, CEO of HyperVelocity, an Atlassian Platinum Enterprise Solution Partner for helpful information on personnel onboarding and tracking customer relationships.
Roberto Musso: Welcome to the Atlassian Advantage podcast series. Here is part one of how Jira make staff onboarding and stakeholder relationship management easy.
Sean O'Sullivan: Hi, everyone. I'd like to thank you all for joining us again today for our latest podcast on how Atlassian can help with personal onboarding and also with tracking customer or stakeholder relationships. My name is Sean. O'Sullivan, the sales director of the Atlassian team at Carahsoft And I'm joined today by CEO of Hyper Velocity and Atlassian Solutions architect, Justin Leader. Justin, thank you so much for joining us today.
Justin Leader: Thank you. Thanks for having me. I'm really excited to get to talk to you and some of your listeners. We have done a lot of really rewarding projects working for our government and military customers with some really great and lightweight tool sets that we've delivered recently. So yeah, I'd love to chat more about it.
Sean O'Sullivan: Awesome. Well, we're happy to have you here, Justin. So the team at Carahsoft, they often receive a lot of questions from our government customers, asking about the benefits of Atlassian technology and solutions and how they can help their agency in staffing and relationship modernization. So for our discussions today, let's start with talking about the HR and onboarding improvements if that's all right. So what are some of the main challenges that public sector HR departments face with their human resource management would you say?
Justin Leader: Well, we've focused a lot on projects where we're trying to help with this really complex onboarding. And oftentimes we help with the off-boarding as well. But we have a lot of government agencies and military divisions and departments that have hundreds of steps of so many different departments involved to bring someone on board. In this environment, it's increasingly complex. There's a lot of changes that happen every few months, certainly over the last couple of months, there's even more changes. And often there's fewer personnel to manage the process.
The main challenges that they face we've heard with a lot of different of these types of customers is that although pretty much every department and discipline within the organization is involved, there's only a few key departments that are really pulling their weight. And not to place blame, but because it takes so much coordination. So even though of course HR is involved, also finances involved for getting the people set up to get paid. Security is involved for background checks and authorization cards, key cards and computer cards. Facilities is involved for equipment, but also the right wiring for different security networks. IT is involved for accounts and also computer equipment and multiple different pieces of equipment based on security levels.
And then we heard the challenge is that often we've got one or two people out of hundreds that are doing the majority of work, even though it's not their job. So someone in HR has been pushing through and walking people around when really the organization has agreed, hey, facilities has to do this or security has to do that. And it's often we see that security just doesn't get the information, they're not informed as part of the process. Or IT doesn't hear about it a week early or two weeks early so that they could set up new network accounts and things like that. So there's so many people involved, and then that creates so much overhead of time and missed opportunities and people sitting around and waiting for two or three weeks and burning money. And people don't know where the process has been stalled, where the bottlenecks are, no one has near enough data to report on it. So it's a big mess and it doesn't need to be.
Sean O'Sullivan: So everything's getting more complicated. All right, so if everything's then getting more complex, what kind of tools are going to be used to help solve these kinds of problems?
Justin Leader: Yeah. There are a number of different ways to go. Pretty much all of our customers are at one end of the spectrum where they are using a spreadsheet or really each person involved has their own, they've built their own internal system or their own personal task management system. Some are using a notepad. Some are using an Excel sheet. Some are using an Excel sheet on a network drive. No one has an end to end system, and no one has a system developed by a project or task management specialist. We don't have to go all the way to the opposite end of building totally custom software just to onboard people because we have enough tools, lightweight task and project management tools. So we specialize in bringing in Jira Service Desk for an easy portal to trigger requests like onboarding and off-boarding, and Jira itself to track those requests and to help automate the creation of the really complex needs where, hey, if this is a military reservist who's joining this organization or an active military or civilian military contractor or military employee civilian, there might be dozens of different steps, but the computer can remember all that.
And so what we try and do is have the system ask the right questions and spit out the right tasks for the right groups. Now, of course, the system needs to be easy to implement or relatively easy. It needs to be able to be changed. So these tasks, these templates of tasks that need to get done, every two to four to six months, they might get changed. And so it does need to be relatively simple to edit that. And then we would be remiss to do this without having tracking available for everyone involved, for the key sponsors of these new hires to say, "Oh, where are things held up? Who do I need to go? What tree do I need to go shake to get Susan her keycard or Santhi her IT accounts? Where are things delayed?" So we focus on that.
And of course it's not going to be used unless it's easy to use. And the key to that is giving people just the view of the work that they need, just the right information. So, Steve in security doesn't need to know the hundred steps, he just needs to know there's a step available for him that is unblocked and ready to be worked on. And then he tells the system his step is done and it knows where to send it. He doesn't need to see the 30 steps before and the 30 steps after, unless he wants to go look at it, he can. So it needs to be adopted and have compliance. And that's the key is that it's providing kind of spoon fed tasks to those teams. Does that answer that question?
Sean O'Sullivan: It does. It does. So then here's what I'm thinking, Justin. Okay, we've got a solution, but let's break it down, I guess for folks who are just getting started. So what are the important steps succeeding in improving that onboarding system?
Justin Leader: Yeah, it's tough to do it right. We've learned some stuff doing it over the past several years. Number one is you need both someone at the top and the people at the bottom. And what I mean at the top is that you need a stakeholder who can endorse, make decisions, and direct people to do things. And at government agencies, this is actually better sometimes than we see in the commercial world, in the corporate world. We've actually found that when someone at the top who has authority says, "We're going to do it this way," that generally we get more buy in, at least initially there are people are more open to doing it. So that's usually successful. But then the people building the tool need to talk directly to the frequent users of it. Can't get bottlenecked into like, "Oh, here's a document that says what we do," and just build right off that. Talking directly to the people in facilities and IT and equipment and security and finance. It doesn't need to be long, but spend an hour or two and see, okay, well, this is 15% of their job. Let's see, how do they do it? And what information is going to be useful? Because if it's not a win-win for them, it's going to be really hard to get 95, 99% compliance in the tool.
So make sure that when you're building this, whether you bring in a consulting firm like us, or you do it in house, the people designing it talk to at least a good subset of all the users that are going to need to use it. And make sure everyone understands that to the extent permissions will allow it, it's going to be transparent so that they know, hey, people can see when I got this task and how long it was until it got done. Not that that's the key focus of it, but that people are going to see that it's on my desk. That is a benefit and a bit of pressure that it provides, especially when it's something that's not the person's main job, but it is their responsibility.
And the key once you build it, and this is all the social stuff, the keys we've learned, once you build it, hands-on training for everyone, at least as many people as possible, it can be remote. Once people are no longer remote, and if you're listening to this in the long future, I'm jealous of you, go to their desks and spend 15, 20 minutes just helping them click through a test task so they get muscle memory on doing it. We find that that's really successful. A three-hour webinar that everyone cannot pay attention to is not good enough. Backup videos, FAQs, how do I look at the status is really nice to have in a knowledge repository. But hands-on training is really important.
Sean O'Sullivan: Gotcha. Gotcha. Those are all very relevant steps. I can't believe you don't think nobody would want to sit through a three-hour webinar. That's shocking.
Justin Leader: It's a really productive time to do other stuff.
Sean O'Sullivan: Right? Let's shift gears here for a second and talk about our next topic, which is modern and light CRM tools for our government agencies.