All about iTrent

The Council introduced a new and improved HR/Payroll system which went live in January 2022. Employees are already accessing Employee Self Service (ESS) to view their information remotely, request mileage, book training and view their payslip. Colleagues even have more autonomy over the data HR hold, like personal details.  

But what else can iTrent do?

Sickness management

Currently, the project team are focusing on introducing real time sickness absence information in iTrent.   A pilot was launched in October 2022 including the People and Organisational Development (OD) Service and Business Services in Social Services. The pilot involved managers of these teams entering sickness absence for their team via People Manager into a test system. The pilot was successful and now these services are entering sickness absence directly into iTrent for their teams. 

Real time sickness absence reporting will be rolled out across the council at the appropriate time to work with services initially via the directorate representatives on project board (see below) to ensure that how it’s delivered meets the needs of each particular service – there is no ‘one size fits all approach’ to this.

Annual leave

Feedback from staff and management clarified that the employee portal and the ability to request annual leave online was being missed. As such, the iTrent system has been developed to manage this. Similar to claiming mileage, employees are able to request leave via ESS and have it approved be their manager in iTrent. The HR Team have tested this initiative and are currently using the system to request and manage Annual Leave successfully. So, keep your eyes peeled as this functionality will be rolled out across the Council soon! 

Eye tests

The eye test form is currently being designed in iTrent and nearing completion. This will mean employees will be able to request eye tests via ESS in the near future.  

Manager dashboards 

Some basic dashboards are already available for managers, setting out some key employment data – we will be developing these later this year to make sure that the information that managers can access at the click of a button is as useful as possible.  We will be talking to managers about this and finding out what is important to them. 

Project Board 

The iTrent Project Board meet every 8 weeks to provide strategic direction and make decisions on the project course. There are representatives from all directorates to ensure views from all service areas are considered. If you would like to provide feedback or suggest ideas of what you would like to see from iTrent in the future contact your Project Board Member as per below: 

Sheenagh Rees – Head Of People & Organisational Development and Chair of Project Board 

Huw Jones – Chief Finance Officer and key delivery partner 

Michael Roberts – Head of Streetcare and Environment Representative 

Rhiannon Crowhurst – Head of Support Services and Transformation and Education, Leisure and Lifelong Learning Representative 

Ian Finnemore - Principal Officer - Business and Performance Management and Social Services and Health and Housing Representative 

Chris Owen - Chief Digital Officer and key delivery partner