MultiChoice’s Unified HR Employee Self-Service Portal

THE SITUATION

A workforce operating across too many systems, with no single place to bring them together.

MultiChoice is one of Africa’s leading entertainment groups, with a large employee base and a mature HR function. That function ran across multiple enterprise platforms, including Oracle PeopleSoft and Sage VIP Payroll, each operating independently with its own login credentials and access requirements.

For employees, the daily experience was one of unnecessary friction. Accessing HR information meant navigating separate systems, managing multiple passwords, and regularly hitting obstacles that had nothing to do with the task at hand.

“Organisations often talk about innovation while handing their teams outdated systems. The tools you provide ultimately shape how your people think, work, and solve problems.”

The underlying platforms were not broken. The gap was at the surface, where employees interacted with those systems every day. MultiChoice recognised that the experience their people had with internal tooling was not a minor inconvenience. It was a signal about the kind of organisation they were building, and they wanted to change it.

THE CHALLENGE

Three compounding constraints that made a simple-sounding brief genuinely difficult to execute.

The ask was conceptually clear: one portal, one login, all HR functions in one place. The difficulty was in what that actually required. Realm was not building a standalone product. It was building a unifying layer across two large, long-established enterprise systems, each with their own APIs and constraints, while handling some of the most sensitive personal data in any organisation, and doing all of it inside the visual and brand standards of a major media group.

Authentication ran through Active Directory, which shaped the login and registration design and constrained some of the available options for user onboarding. The solution had to work within that structure rather than around it.

REALM’S APPROACH

Stop asking employees to manage systems. Build one place that manages it for them.

Realm came into the project with an existing relationship with MultiChoice, built through prior technology and integration work across the group. That history meant early conversations could move directly to substance. The focus was on understanding the real problem: not that the HR platforms were inadequate, but that employees had no coherent way to move between them.

Structured discovery before anything else

The project opened with a series of workshops. The first session was high-level, with MultiChoice walking Realm through the business challenges, what had been tried previously, and what a successful outcome would need to look like. Realm used that session to identify the gaps and open questions, then ran a follow-up workshop to work through the detail before any design or architecture work began.

Specification investment pays for itself in build

Complex integrations surface their real constraints during build, not during planning. Having a thorough specification in place meant that when constraints appeared, the team had a common reference point to work from rather than renegotiating scope under pressure.

From there, Realm produced a full end-to-end wireframe of the solution, mapping every interaction from login through to the individual HR functions. Running alongside the wireframes was a systems requirement specification documenting the business rules, technical requirements, and feature logic in full. With the specification signed off, we moved into high-fidelity UI design, giving the client a clear view of how the finished product would look and behave before production development began.

Build and delivery

Development ran on an agile Scrum basis, with functionality delivered and tested in sprints. MultiChoice’s team was actively involved throughout, participating in UAT on each feature as it was completed and providing feedback in every cycle. Course adjustments were made as business requirements shifted or technical constraints surfaced. The overall direction held throughout.

THE OUTCOME

Employees gained a working environment that reflected the organisation MultiChoice was building.

Before the portal, completing a routine HR task could mean knowing which of several systems held the relevant information, maintaining separate credentials for each, and navigating between platforms to do something that should have taken a minute. The portal collapsed that into a single authenticated experience. Employees could complete HR tasks, access records, update personal details, and retrieve documentation from one place, without switching systems or managing multiple logins.

What became possible

The project was delivered on time and within budget. MultiChoice’s Group HR Manager for Technology was closely involved throughout, and the engagement was considered a strong collaborative effort by both sides. The working relationship continued beyond the project, with Realm remaining an active partner across the broader MultiChoice and DSTV group.

WHAT THIS TELLS YOU ABOUT HOW WE WORK

The brief was a portal. The actual work was holding several hard problems together without dropping any of them.

A project like this is easy to underestimate from the outside. The concept is simple to describe. The execution is not. Realm held the integration constraints, the security requirements, the authentication limitations, and the brand standards simultaneously, across every phase from discovery through to UAT, without losing sight of the original brief.

The project also demonstrated what a genuine working partnership looks like in practice. MultiChoice’s team was present and engaged at every stage. That involvement was not incidental. On a project of this complexity, it was a structural requirement, and both sides understood that from the start.