From Zing’s experience working with its partner charities, it has become apparent that there is a need for an HR Application that will do most of what all but the very largest or complicated charities need, but at a significantly lower cost than current offerings and without the need for expensive technical managers or consultants to carry out implementation.
What is our proposed solution?
Zing is planning the development of an HR Application that would have similar functionality to those already in use by small and medium size companies and charities.
The first phase of the design and development would be conducted in collaboration with the Civi Core Team with the intention of producing a new Civi module called CiviHR. The second phase of the project would take CiviHR, and make it available for use by charities as Software as a Service (Zing SaaS).
The hosted model of Zing SaaS, along with an application design emphasising simplicity of use and the inclusion of extensive tool tips and other help, would support the objective of minimising the need for expensive technical managers or consultants to carry out the implementation for those charities that lack the skills or confidence to download and configure the software.
Who are the target customers?
The target customers are small and medium size charities and other not for profit organisations. The design of the application will be aimed at the needs of those organisations that manage at least twenty staff (both employees and volunteers). However, the design will not be aimed at the needs of very large charities that might require continuing support requirements beyond Zing’s resources.
What will be the measure of success?
The project will be considered to have been a success if over 50 medium size charities use the application (either CiviHR or Zing SaaS) over a sustained period. However, the ambition is that 500 - 1,000 organisations will be using it within three years of the system going live.
Proposed Functionality
1. Who works for us?
Staff Details (Employees & Volunteers)
Joiners
Leavers
2. Who wants to work for us?
Recruitment
Online Recruitment
Induction
Probation
3. What do people do and who do they report to?
Roles
Org Chart Designer
4. What are people doing with their time?
Holidays
Sickness
Other Absence
Timesheets
5. How much are people costing?
Remuneration
Expenses
Asset Tracking
6. How are people performing?
Appraisals
Disciplinary / PIP
7. What are people capable of?
Skills / Qualifications
Training
8. Who can view or change HR data?
User Accounts
Permissions
9. How can we make the application easily accessible?
Self-Service
Mobile
Internationalisation
Tool Tips / Help
10. How can we generate information from the data?
Reporting - Pre-Determined
Reporting - Ad Hoc
We are also considering whether to include Rotas within the functionality, and we welcome any comments and questions on this and on all other issues.
Comments
Hi,
That's sounds like a great project!
Few points:
Remuneration
Might be interesting to clarify which country(ies) you want to target and start collecting on a wiki examples of payslips in various countries.
The only thing that is common between countries seems to be that the org has to pay something and the employee receives less at the end. In between, you can have dozen of deductions and taxes where the names and calculation varies widely based on the infinite creativity of our governements.
To make it funnier, the names and rates of the items varies in the same country (the new gov increases a rate from 4 to 5 in effect in 3 months) or based on each employee (eg. those about 60 don't pay X).
Anyway, this is potentially something very complex to accomodate all the cases, might be better to focus on a few countries and rules?
Not sure how your SaaS offer is going to look like, but would be really interesting that you track and update automatically the changes in the regulation and update the rate of this item next month, so the orgs don't have to follow it. I would suggest to offer that as a service even if you are not hosting the application so I could subscribe and let you adjust the rates based on the changes in the regulation.
Would be useful to be able to share "recipes" of remunerations, so if I'm a canadian NGO, I can re-use the template as created by another canadian charity.
(the setting api is going to be great for both sharing and updating automatically)
Budget Planning
An item that is often a PITA is planning the salaries for next year. Might be a report that you export of the existing staff and load in excel. Ideally, with some formula (doesnt' work on csv) so I can see what's happening if I increase the salaries of the policy officers by 4%
Timesheet/Holidays are activities
This one is a pet issue of mine: timesheet should be linked to existing activities. It doesn't make sense to spend time on stuff that aren't activities, it doesn't either not to reuse your "TODO" to fill the timesheet.
eg if I have a 1 hour meeting with Chris scheduled for tomorrow at noon, I wouldn't make sense to have both to update it to change its status and update its duration AND having to enter "lunch with Mr. White" in my timesheet.
IMO the timeslots should be linked to activities in civi.
Recruitement
Some of our clients already use civi for the recruitement (either as profile with custom fields for each question, or webform civicrm and activities). They tend to use the status of the activity or a custom field to log who is rejected, shortlisted... It can then allow best practices, like finally treating the candidates like human beings and send them all an email to let them know their candidacy has been rejected or not instead of the usual "if you don't hear from us, please take it as a hint you are worthless to us"
Re use and extend
It's probably obvious for everyone, but civi got already quite a few features that can be directly used (eg org chart based on relationships).
It would be interesting than rather to develop hr as a single component/module, have smaller and more focussed features packaged as extensions, so I could add/enable Expenses but not Asset tracking. Would be more flexible and make it easy to collaborate (eg If the Disciplinary is completely different in my country, could implement it as a separate extension)
Hi Xavier,
Thanks so much for your comments. My responses are as follows:
Remuneration
This is indeed a very complex area, and we do not have any initial plans to provide for the automatic calculation of taxes or other payroll deductions. The remuneration functionality will initially be restricted to just recording the pay and other benefits relevant to a staff member's remuneration package. However, we will be looking at ways in which we might transfer these remuneration details to the payroll software and services commonly used by organisations.
Budgets
This is a great suggestion. I will add it to our list for consideration.
Timesheets & Activities
Yes, I agree this could be very useful. I will look into it further.
Recruitment
We need to provide better tools for communcation with candidates, both so that they can be treated better, and also to reduce the workload of the organisation that is looking to recruit. I will add to our list.
Re-use & Extend
This is a very interesting point, and one that I am hoping will draw comments from many others in the Civi Community.
First, I must tell you that I am relatively new to CiviCRM and I am yet to become familiar with all its functions and features, but we will of course be aiming to use as many of them as possible, rather than spending development time on needless duplication.
Second, not being a developer myself, it is not immediately obvious to me whether CiviHR should be developed as a single component/module or as a series of extensions (or a mix of both). I need to understand more about what implications these different approaches would have.
Furthermore, consideration of this issue must take into account one of Zing's core objectives for CiviHR, which is that it will be useable by organisations that may already use a CRM solution other than CiviCRM. However, assuming that this can be achieved, we would like organisations to be able to pick and choose from the available functions within CiviHR so that they do not have to accommodate lots of functionality that it inappropriate to them.
Very good extension of CiviCRM for its target market.
At some point it may be useful to look at having CiviHR do some of the payroll stuff inside CiviCRM. FWIW, accounting integration will provide the ability to look after accounts payable and expense lines. JMA has enhanced CiviGrants to also handle cutting and tracking cheques for recipients.
Thanks for the comment about Accounting Integration and Payroll Integration. I have added them into the requirements specification.
Hi Andrew,
Looks great. We have a client who would certainly be interested in this and we would be pleased to collaborate.
A few extra ideas:
- TOIL / Overtime
- Separate security profiles for users to submit their holidays, timesheets and sickness etc without system access (possible CMS integration?)
On another point an "Org chart designer" for complex company group structures would be very useful feature for industry/trade membership organisations.
Best
I have added, TOIL and Overtime into the requirements specification - thanks.
Our company likes to have a leave registration. Will leave registration be part of the CiviHR module? If so, please let me know if I can have a look at it already.
Do you have any idea at what time it will be available?
Thank you very much in advance for your time.
Kind regards,
The intention is to allow users to book their own leave, with a workflow sending the request to their manager for approval. Is this the sort of functionality that you are looking for?
The first version is scheduled to be available in time for CiviCon London in October 2013, with other features to be added according to the schedule on the wiki:
http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRM/Project+Phases
Would you be interested in working with us as a development partner?
A few years ago I did a bit of (personal) research on opensource ERPs and whatnot. I thought that http://www.orangehrm.com/ was the best of what I found. It's product page seems to fulfill on just about all of the requirements that you list
I'd think it may be better to integrate with a solution that already works than add functionality expanding the scope of a CRM to include HR.
Thanks for the comment about Orange HRM. A number of other people have also suggested using this instead of us adding HR features to CiviCRM.
We looked long and hard at Orange HRM, and we could see that it is a very good HR application. However, in the end, we decided that it would not work for us since it is designed by a corporate for use by corporates. We believe that the HR requirements of NFP's are sufficiently different to those of corporates to warrant their own application (eg Volunteers are not catered for by Orange HRM), and that this application would need to be developed from the start in consultation with HR managers at NFP's.
Moreover, we decided that Zing, as an NFP, needed to work with another NFP, as is the case with CiviCRM. Orange HRM is a corporate, and we deemed that if we partnered with them, the differing cultures and objectives would inevitably come into conflict. We believe that we will be more successful over the longer term by partnering with CiviCRM.
At the San Francisco sprints in April I started work with Tim Otten on the design of CiviHR, and you can see the revised development schedule at:
http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRM/Project+Phases
The first phase is scheduled for completion by the end of September 2013, in time for CiviCon London.
One very important issue discussed amongst the core team was security, and as a result, the decision was made to initially develop CiviHR as stand-alone from CiviCRM, although much of the code will still be shared. The reason for this is that HR data requires much more flexible security features than are currently available in CiviCRM.
For organisations already using CiviCRM, they will need to install CiviHR as a separate application. The plan is to eventually integrate the two applications, once the security issues have been resolved.