I got a lot of grief as a kid for daydreaming. Teachers would be trying to change the direction of my misguided youth and I’d be totally zoned out in the back of the classroom wondering if Major Tom or Ziggy Stardust were real people. If an adult back then was being nice, they might say I had an overactive imagination.

Perhaps my current career path is an accommodation to that dreamy tendency. Of course, now that I’m a consultant, I call it much more impressive names such as “big-picture thinking”, “goal-setting”, and my favorite: “vision-casting”! After all, we could just call what I do “dreaming up cool stuff”—that just doesn’t sound billable.

Our team helps employers with their HR Technology goals. A big piece of that is being able to dream with them about what life could be like on the other side of their pain and problems. Of course, we help executives think of ways to control the rising costs of running their enterprises and control their vendor or system costs. But often, we get to use our vision to just help someone who is overworked, stressed, and incredibly frustrated see how their work life could be different with a little automation or technology judiciously applied to the right situation.

Paula is one of our Solution Consultants who lives near San Diego. (Yes, I am totally jealous and pester her about the weather whenever we talk!) She was recently working with a client to create a vision of what benefits administration could be like with an automated solution replacing paper enrollment forms. What they came up with is a fantastic process overview I would like to share in case you’re trying to think about what benefits administration could look like for your organization. Perhaps you already have a system and need a way to illustrate it to your teammates to talk about points of failure or areas of change.

We hope Paula’s picture is a perfect fit for your needs.