HRSD Shared Services: What Actually Breaks Six Months After Go-Live
An HR shared services lead at a 3,200-person industrial group in the Ruhr called me in the first week of October. They had gone live on ServiceNow HRSD in mid-March. The project had been clean. Two tiers of case management, Employee Center up, Lifecycle Events wired for onboarding and offboarding, SuccessFactors sitting underneath as the system of record. The go-live metrics were the kind you put in a steering slide. Case volume handled per FTE up eighteen percent. First response time down forty-two percent. Portal adoption at seventy-six percent in the first month. Six months later the numbers had flattened and the complaints had rotated. The HR business partners were saying the tool felt heavier than the inbox it replaced. The works council was asking pointed questions about who could read what case data. Two of the regional HR managers had started routing sensitive cases back through email because they did not trust the security model. The shared services lead sent me the Employee Center feedback form export and asked a simple question. Why does HRSD get worse at month six.