Goal: Recruitment team uses Lever as their new Applicant Tracking System (ATS). They can access all the historical data from Greenhouse after its transferred to Lever. They are trained to use Lever. Job site is working seamlessly after the ATS change. 

Type: Technology 
External stakeholders: Greenhouse and Lever representatives
Internal stakeholders: Recruitment, Privacy & Security, Internal IT, Engineering
Year and my position back then: end of 2018 to spring 2019, People Operations Team Lead

Description:

This project was handed to me when the new vendor was already selected. As a first step, organised a cost discussion call. Next, set up the project timeline. Following actions were scheduled and completed:

• Trainings for Recruitment team (conducted by Lever representatives)
• Job site disconnected from Greenhouse and connected to Lever (planned with Engineering team developers and executed on time)
• HRIS disconnected from Greenhouse and connected to Lever (executed by me) 
• Historical data pulled from Greenhouse by me, cleaned and reviewed with the help of Recruitment team and then transferred to Lever with the help of Lever implementation specialist. I was managing the project.
  
• GDPR rules set in place
• Communication sent to the company
• Setting up proper access levels
• Setting up SSO (with help from internal IT)
• Launch
• Fixing issues that came up after the launch

Key take-aways: 

+ I was able to run People Technology related global project
+ Project was completed on time as we had time buffer to use

– It came out to be more complex project than initially predicted.
– It taught me that more emphasis should go to the selection process to make sure that the new solution is actually better than the initial one.
– It should be clearly defined from the beginning who owns the new software after it is implemented. 

Goal: Pipedrive Estonia to have health care benefit
Type: Reward
External stakeholders: Different private health care provides for initial screening, chosen partner’s representatives
Internal stakeholders: Board, Finance, Legal, People Ops team
Year and my position back then: end of 2018 to spring 2019, People Operations Team Lead

Description:

This project was handed to me when CFO suggested that Estonia could also offer health care benefit as US does. Health care benefit was not so common benefit offered in Estonia at that time so we saw this as a great opportunity to increase our benefit package.

Started from mapping all the insurance providers that offer this product in Estonia. Found only three and met with them all. After initial interviews, found the best future partner as for the cost and variety of coverings. We decided to go with private health care and accident insurance package. Next steps were:

• Prepared cost calculations and presented to the C-level
• Package discussions and cost comparisons took place
• Negotiated with chosen provider to offer us better package and deep dived into understanding the exclusions
• Budget was approved, contract sent to Legal to review
• Discussed with Finance how the payments will be made, what taxes will apply etc 
• Set up process for adding/removing people to/from the list and sharing the list with insurance provider. Tried to make it as automated as possible. Then handed this task over to my team member
• Prepared internal information pages for sharing the details to the employees, especially emphasising that there are exclusions they should know about before starting to use the benefit
• Sent communication in Slack but also invited provider’s representative to the office to give a short seminar to introduce the details of the new benefit
• Insurance package became effective from Jan, 2019 
• Answered all the questions employees, Finance or the provider had after the launch

Key take-aways: 

+ If you have great stakeholders, project management can be very smooth
+ Project was completed in time, no additional costs

– There is never enough communication, few people still got a bad experience as they did not read about the exclusions

* In addition to health care benefit, also managed setting up sports and additional sick days benefit in 2018. Health care was just the most complicated one.

In order to protect company’s sensitive information, have replaced the department and the work with X and Y respectively. 

Goal: To compensate X department employees for Y in every location where X department employees work.  
Type: Legal
External stakeholders: Legal firm
Internal stakeholders: X department VP, X department employees, People Ops Specialist, Finance, developer, Infrastructure team representatives
Year and my position back then: end of 2020 to spring 2021, People Operations Team Lead

Description: Project goal was to compensate employees for Y fairly. Current legislation in Estonia made it complicated. 

First steps:

• Talked to my manager to understand where the project is at
  
• Made sure to understand how we compensated until then
  
• Talked with VP of X to understand what he would like to achieve 

Next steps:

• Discussed with legal partners about the legislation and for their suggestions
• Prepared cost calculations and presented these to the VP and then to CFO 
• Discussed with Finance what they need, what they suggest etc 
• Agreed that we implement the same rules for Estonia and Latvia, other EU locations had already put into place rules that match their legal framework, so we agreed not to change theirs 

Rest of the project: 

• Created a draft document that described everything about the new system. Found many details we had not yet considered. Discussed with legal, my manager, VP for decisions on those
• Had meetings with a developer and Infrastructure team to understand what are the possibilities for collecting the hours spent on Y as automated way as possible. Agreed with them solutions that need to be implemented and how big part of the hours and compensation calculation remains to People Ops teams. There were many details to agree on as national holidays, working periods, employee changes etc affected Y compensation and we needed to be very precise
• Collected all the details for Y for other locations and added the information to the main document, so X department employees had one central place to look for guidelines on Y
• Created myself Google Sheets file with formulas and automations for the part of work that could not be taken away by the solutions provided by the Infrastructure team
• Prepared communication to the department X employees 
• Trained People Ops Specialist to use the Google Sheet and prepare data for Finance team for payouts

Results:

• Central document to give all X department employees information on Y compensation
• Y compensation got more fair than it was before
• Y compensation calculation got more automated and some part of manual work was removed. Unfortunately, not all. 

Key take-aways: 

+ Experience with working with Infrastructure team
+ Experience in setting up a specific compensation plan

– Some projects can have so many details that these keep coming up and you need to adjust your solution to accommodate everything
– There are limited resources so automations are possible to only some extent. This project’s result would definitely need additional level of automatisation.