Sizing the work: Unit4 review, diagnostic or remediation programme

Beyond the free Unit4 HR and payroll health check sit three commitments. They differ by what they produce.

A review answers the question a leadership team asks: what state the system is in, and what it would take to put it right. A diagnostic answers a narrower one: within a defined area, which configuration decisions and defects cost money now, in what order to correct them, and what each correction takes. A remediation programme assumes both answers exist and commits people to the work.

The common error is order. A programme is raised because the symptoms are loud, before anyone has written down what the system does, and its opening weeks go on discovery that one week of diagnostic work would have settled.

Before any of them, run the free twelve-question health check on this site. It shows whether the conversation is worth having.

Judge the three by the artefact that lands on the table at the end.

A review

Bear Consulting Services writes an independent review of the HR and payroll system: findings, remediation options and consultancy estimates against each, for an executive audience. Where the question sits above the system, the work extends to workforce and people plan analysis, an HR transformation plan, a knowledge and training strategy or a briefing for the leadership team. The result is a document a director can put before a board without translation.

A diagnostic

The Unit4 X-Ray takes one week of work on one defined area of a Unit4 Business World system. It produces three deliverables: a plain-English executive report, a technical configuration blueprint for the systems team, and a sequenced remediation roadmap with effort and risk profile against each item. The fee is £7,000 excluding VAT, indicative, subject to scoping.

A remediation programme

Bear Consulting works to the roadmap, configuring, testing and proving each change. Where the work is packaged, fee and duration are fixed and agreed at scoping.

Answer each before the business case is drafted.

• State the problem in one paragraph a non-specialist would accept. A list of symptoms means a review: nobody can cost what has not been described.
• Name the fixes, in order, with an effort figure against each. A known cause with a guessed sequence means a diagnostic. A roadmap built without one is usually the loudest complaints in the order they arrived.
• Name who does the work next month. Only when the first two answers exist and this one does not is the work a remediation programme. Raised earlier, it spends delivery capacity on discovery.

Oversize the work and the business case dies when someone asks what the money buys. Undersize it and everyone agrees with the review and nobody acts on it.

The X-Ray carries a published fee. For packaged remediation, fee and duration are fixed and agreed at scoping. A review, and any work not yet scoped, is priced once the scope is agreed.

At every size, the arrangement is set out in a written agreement before work starts.

A central Unit4 support function in higher education carried a ticket backlog its own team could not clear.

The obvious response was a programme. The situation needed something smaller: a defect tracking and resolution routine through the service desk, managed service levels, and the existing team upskilled to run it after the engagement ended. The backlog halved and service-level compliance returned across the team’s tickets.

A programme would have cost more and left the team with the same habits. A review would have described a backlog nobody had capacity to clear.

Read the case in full on the case studies page.

Three routes, in order of commitment.

• Run the free Unit4 HR and payroll health check. Twelve questions across the six assessment domains, scored on the page in about two minutes: the Unit4 HR and payroll health check.
• Compare the six services. What each includes and excludes is set out on services, and the X-Ray brief describes the diagnostic in full.
• Read the engagement behind the worked example. The higher-education support engagement above is written up as a support backlog cut by 50 per cent.