Why Indian Enterprises Are Getting HR Operating Model Design Wrong

The Dave Ulrich three-box HR operating model has been the dominant framework for large enterprise HR function design for three decades. Business partners embedded with business units, centres of excellence for specialist functions, and shared services for transactional work. Almost every Indian enterprise with more than 3,000 employees has implemented some version of this model.

Most of them are disappointed with the results. The business partners are not doing strategic work — they are handling escalated transactions that the shared services centre cannot resolve. The centres of excellence are producing frameworks and policies that the business does not use.

The shared services centre is reducing cost but not improving experience. The problem is almost never the model. It is three execution failures that recur across every underperforming implementation we have reviewed. First: HR business partners who were not selected or developed for the strategic advisory role.

Moving a strong HR generalist into an HRBP role without fundamentally changing their work and capability is not a transformation. It is a rebadging. Second: shared services centres that were scoped too narrowly to achieve the transactional consolidation that justifies their cost.

The decision to keep some transactional work with the BPs 'for now' typically means permanently. Third: technology that was not ready to support the model. The SSC cannot function without an HCM platform that actually enables self-service. Implementing Ulrich before the HCM platform is live is the most common sequencing error we see..