Apparently, yes. My career has a habit of wandering into systems, IT, process design, self-service, data, training and communication — usually because something needed doing and I was curious enough to get involved.
I used to get chastised for wandering into other people’s scopes — both inside and outside HR. Eventually I realised I wasn’t wandering randomly. I was following the friction across organisational boundaries because the person experiencing the process did not stop at the boundary.
Each department’s clearance requirement can make perfect sense on its own. Put them together and the officer can end up physically walking the organisation’s fragmentation from desk to desk.
The end-to-end experience did not belong neatly to HR, Admin, IT, Finance or any other single function. So if the friction crossed the boundary, I crossed it too.
Not because every adjacent function had become “my job”. Because somebody still had to see the whole thing.
Not a collection of hobbies. These are examples of responsibilities and projects that grew around the core HR work.
During COVID-19 at a social service agency, I concurrently supported end users, procured and set up laptops and Microsoft 365 accounts, helped maintain network equipment and coordinated external IT vendors.
Implemented an organisation-wide intranet platform intranet to centralise HR resources and reduce recurring queries.
Identified scalability and data-integrity issues in contract lifecycle tracking and designed a purpose-built replacement prototype around role-based permissions, notifications and existing approval flows.
Created HR guides, training materials, process maps and user-facing resources alongside system and process work — because implementation depends on people understanding what changed.
Or the less boring conversation about any of this.