Alright, so Ulrich got the Business Partner, the Centers of Expertise as well as the Shared Service Center. But these three roles are not sufficient for his model to work in real life. So he introduced in the early 2000 two additional roles to support his model: The Operational Implementers and the HR Leadership Team. Why are these so important?
Well, I guess many of us who have seen Business Partners have seen that still a lot of operational (or high-touch) tasks remain in the organization on the ground – things that cannot be executed from a shared service center due to distance. Without the Operational Implementers the Business Partner would be stuck with them. But Ulrich wants the Business Partner to be freed up for strategic tasks. And to enable this, Ulrich introduced the Operational Implementers – they are sitting in the BU, local, wherever the on-the-ground work needs to be executed. In addition to that they support in implementing the strategic agenda – meaning executing the Change Management, the local implementation of new processes – that is why Ulrich has called them Operational Implementers.
The 2nd additional role is the HR leadership Team or HR for HR. Ulrich said that to make his model work in real life, there needs to be a functional oversight, a body that steers the overall direction of HR within the company as well as an HR body that executes the CEOs agenda. This is the HR leadership team. It sits where the CEO sits and is responsible for a) executing the CEOs agenda b) ensuring alignment of all HR people to the overall strategic direction of the company c) solving internal issues between CoEs, BPs and SSCs and d) ensuring continuous improvement and learning of the whole HR organization.
These are now all roles that Ulrich has envisioned. Now what it needs is a governance model to link these roles and ensure cooperation – this is quite interesting in the Ulrich Model, and highly controversial, but I will get into it in my next blog.
Chief HR Officer 