Accenture Human Resources designed Performance Achievement, a new performance management approach in collaboration with Accenture’s global IT organization; Fjord, part of Accenture Interactive; and early adopter groups. Human Resources and Fjord focused on applying human-centered, experience design to the concepts, while global IT partnered with Human Resources to develop the functional and technical requirements.
Global IT together with Human Resources solution architects assessed the marketplace for packaged solutions but were unable to find any that would meet this project’s unique requirements. This outcome led the team to turning to build a solution. Development had to be done quickly to meet a tight timeline. To support this objective, a core global IT team started with three main tenets:
- Stay on the leading edge architecturally and use on-demand cloud computing platforms to allow for fast development and experimentation.
- Move toward use of microservices architecture.
- Be cloud-first.
The team applied these tenets to the design and front-end custom development. For the back end, the team applied Accenture’s experience with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to use on-demand cloud offerings that were a fit. The benefit of this approach was in being able to move away from a traditionally structured database and instead move toward the use of unstructured databases. This architecture allowed the teams to be fast and agile, enabling global IT to meet the aggressive timeline set by leadership.
Development followed an agile methodology. The technical architecture work was ongoing by global IT, and as one release was being developed, solution architects in the Human Resources space would be planning the next couple. Global IT development teams in the United States used a responsive framework to develop the back end, holding daily scrums and moving from releases every few months to monthly. Global IT also teamed with rapid global development cells in Spain and Argentina that developed the functional components and teamed continuously with operations teams in India.
New features and changes were continually deployed into production, which included integration with a related Total Rewards application to allow for automated feeds to the Total Rewards teams for administering employee compensation. Over the years, the tool has grown richer in functionality with many new features added. Significant improvements have been made in the following areas:
Real-time performance
- Rolled out near-real-time global reporting capability on performance review process.
- Launched new, innovative features aligned with providing continual, real-time feedback.
High availability and speed
- Enabled cloud-centric architected solutions to ensure designs included fail-forward and self-recovery mechanisms, resulting in zero downtime.
- Re-architected the core service engine to ensure performance optimization, resulting in significant speed improvements, with feature-rich functions.
Operational excellence
- Reduced operating cost by 10 percent year over year, despite the increase in functionality and up-time needs.
- Revamped operating procedures to provide best-in-class, “eyes-on-glass” monitoring and hyper-care support, resulting in response times within minutes.
Using an on-demand cloud computing platform for the Performance Achievement system enables Accenture people to complete the performance achievement process remotely and virtually, from wherever they are in the world. This approach supports a seamless employee experience, making sure our people receive the conversations and feedback they need and as committed. This capability works smoothly even in times when everyone is working from home or when the cycle needs to be compressed.