How the London School of Economics swept away decades of HR tech legacy

The London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) says replacing 250 legacy HR and payroll processes with a single platform has saved significant time for both employees and its Help Desk.

The new system, implemented by UK-headquartered HR, payroll and finance software specialist MHR, has delivered automated workflows and analytics that give people managers greater visibility across HR and payroll operations - reducing average handling time for key processes while supporting better employee development.

Neelam Talewar, LSE's Director of HR Operations, says success was built on careful preparation. A conscious change management programme included focus groups, HR away days and 'Evolve Roadshows' attended by approximately 250 staff over a 12-month pre-go-live period. A co-design process with MHR ran alongside it.

The results were immediate. Within a month of the January 2025 implementation, 4,600 of 5,000 possible internal users - 92% - had switched over. The system also provides dashboards and data reports that give both HR and University leadership greater visibility into pay and personnel matters.

Talewar says the ambition ran deeper than a technology refresh:

From day one, this was about more than software; it was about changing the way we work here.

New ideas that cooked perfectly over time

Talewar works in the back office of an internationally renowned university specializing in the social sciences. Established in 1895, LSE was ranked the top university in London and sixth in the world for Social Science and Management subjects in the QS World University Rankings by Subject 2025.

Plans for a new system began taking shape well before the pandemic. As a wider digital transformation gathered momentum across the university - touching everything from lecture delivery to back-office operations - the case for modernizing HR became harder to ignore.

We started thinking about the need to move off legacy even pre-COVID - but that became part of a much wider and more ambitious use of technology here, from the way we deliver lectures at the university to just everything we do.

Process complexity was a significant part of the problem. Talewar describes approval chains with multiple actors, unclear roles and responsibilities, and tasks that should have taken ten minutes routinely taking two or three times as long. That burden fell on administration staff and, she thinks, wasted time for users across the institution.

User frustration was equally plain when LSE went out to market:

Our procurement exercise ended up being extremely thorough, as users said the current systems you have at the moment don't look great, the user experience is appalling, and they're just not simple enough.

Talewar was eventually given a dual role as Programme Director of Evolve, an internal digital transformation programme. She scoped the new system carefully, consulting 30 other UK universities to map the state of the HR tech landscape before engaging MHR in 2023 and entering a design phase ahead of the 2025 deployment. Twenty-two internal software champions, embedded across LSE's departments, supported the rollout.

'Removing the need for HR administrators to re-key data'

Under the previous regime, each document required manual creation from templates, individual checking, and emailing to the employee. Documents are now automatically generated from pre-created templates, completed digitally, and filed directly to the employee record. More than 2,500 documents and letters have been generated entirely within the new system since go-live.

Self-service onboarding has also improved data accuracy. New hires now enter their own personal information directly into the system, removing the need for HR administrators to re-key data - reducing error risk, improving the completeness of HR records, and speeding up onboarding.

The payroll team has seen a notable drop in routine pay queries since the introduction of digital payslips. Employees can now access detailed pay breakdowns within the system, reducing the need to contact the Help Desk. Annual leave queries to the HR Information & Systems team have fallen sharply enough that LSE has been able to close a dedicated inbox for them entirely.

Talewar says the response from staff has been unambiguous:

Because they've got their people data at their fingertips and, with single sign-on, can go in and look at their own data, people have been coming to me to say how much they prefer this to the 'Bad Old Days.'

Next steps

AI is the next step and Talewar says automation was introduced deliberately to make routine tasks faster and surface richer information for decision-makers - and that the groundwork laid by the MHR implementation now positions LSE well for what’s to come.

AI is a critical part of our future HR strategy here. As a direct result of all that, in six months I'll be looking for better reporting, better data, and better use of AI.