Onboarding playbooks for HR system rollouts

The moment this surfaces: a company has just gone live on a new HR system, or promoted someone internally into an HR admin role, and that person spends their first several weeks figuring out where everything is by trial and error. 'Finding things right away can be a challenge at first' and 'it does take some time to find what you need if you don't know what category to look in' are specifically the experience of being new to the system. The vendor provides generic documentation, but it's organized by feature, not by workflow — it tells you what a field does, not where to find it when you're standing in the middle of a payroll run that's due in an hour.

This gap persists because HR software vendors sell to HR directors who are experienced users or who hand the system to an implementation consultant. The actual day-to-day admins — often HR generalists or office managers at smaller companies — inherit the system after the implementation engagement ends, with no one to call except a support line. The vendor has already been paid; the implementation partner has moved on. Nobody is incentivized to invest in 'what does the new HR admin need to find things quickly.'

What's missing isn't another knowledge base. It's role-specific, system-specific, task-sequenced guidance that says 'to run your first off-cycle payroll, here are the five screens you'll touch, in this order, and here's exactly where each one lives in your specific configuration.' The complaints are specific about the configuration problem: 'it can be difficult to find certain fields and sections because they are moved or hidden' — meaning the generic documentation doesn't match what they're actually seeing because their instance is configured differently.

This is a business because HR admin turnover is real, and every time someone new takes over, the knowledge-loss-and-rediscovery cycle restarts. It also recurs when the vendor ships a UI update that moves things around, which happens on a schedule the vendor controls, not the customer.

What to build

Build a service that produces configuration-specific, role-specific navigation guides for ADP Workforce Now and Adrenalin HCM — delivered as a structured, searchable web guide — by combining a lightweight discovery session with the outgoing admin or implementation partner to capture the specific menu paths and field locations in that company's exact instance.

Where to start

Target ADP implementation partners and HR consultants as a resale channel — they already have the configuration knowledge from the implementation engagement, have a reason to want their clients to succeed post-go-live, and can deliver the guide as a paid add-on to their existing project scope.

The hard part

The product's value is that it's specific to the customer's configuration, but producing that specificity manually is labor-intensive and doesn't scale — the early business is essentially a productized service, and the hard trade-off is deciding when and how to automate the discovery process without losing the accuracy that makes it worth buying.

How it makes money

One-time fee per guide ($500–$1,500 depending on system complexity and number of roles covered), with an annual refresh fee ($200–$400) triggered by major vendor UI updates — sold directly or through implementation partners at a referral margin.