Challenge

The City of Boston wanted to provide a more accessible, convenient, and easy-to-use online experience for its 16,994 municipal employees. One important piece of this strategy was upgrading their PeopleSoft system from version to 9.1 to 9.2. This task was a huge undertaking all its own. However, the CIO didn’t want to wait on the second part: redesigning their PeopleSoft HR self-service platform. 

The CIO was committed to modernizing the PeopleSoft user interface and mobilizing access to key functions. City employees were increasingly demanding self-service applications, paperless processing, and equal access to real-time PeopleSoft information. Even employees who didn’t regularly use computers at home or at work were seeking improvements to their user experience. 

In addition, the City discovered that the changes they wanted to make to the platform weren’t possible with their current PeopleTools instance. They considered upgrading to PeopleTools 8.55 to gain the functionality of PeopleSoft’s new Fluid UI, but couldn’t initiate that upgrade until 2017. Even then, they’d still have to bring the development team up to speed on Fluid. 

It made sense to kill two birds with one stone, so the team decided to move forward with both initiatives at once despite the major challenges involved. Now they just needed a partner to help them make it happen.

Solution

The City of Boston sent an RFP to the Skuid team, and they proposed mobile applications for employee self-service at a fraction of the project budget. These enhanced applications would modernize PeopleSoft Core HR functions and provide responsive web apps that were accessible for all user devices.

As soon as they were given the green light, they used Skuid to implement the updated HR mobile apps, deploying in just two weeks. The City was so impressed with the quality of the UX/UI, the speed of deployment, and the affordability of the solution that they expanded the project to take advantage of everything Skuid could offer. 

This included additional mobile applications like Benefits Summary, Benefits Enrollment, Qualifying Life Events, and more self-service HR functions. Using Skuid, they also extended app access to kiosks in public buildings so all workers could access them. This involved blending kiosk hardware and application software using a hybrid of native and web apps and PeopleSoft functionality. With Skuid, it was even possible for employees to use the kiosk’s iPad camera to capture and attach supporting documents. 

And they completed the entire implementation before the start of benefits enrollments – a six-week window.

Results

The City of Boston got everything they requested and more from their partnership with Skuid. Plus, they got it for less than partial solution from another vendor. Skuid was highly adaptable even as the scope of the project expanded, taking the initiative around UX/UI mobilization, internal team and function integration, and vendor coordination. In fact, the entire project was completed in less than six months. 

By working with Skuid, the City of Boston achieved much more than it originally envisioned for its modernization initiatives. And now, they have complete control over the appearance, behavior, and usability of their PeopleSoft software across all interfaces.