Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Canada to Scrap IBM Payroll Plan Gone Awry Costing $1B

itprotoday.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 333 posts

Re: Canada to Scrap IBM Payroll Plan Gone Awry Costing $1B

#31

Post by j45 »

52-6F-62 wrote: post #11
j45 wrote: post #4

The comments made about the government about excluding IBM from making future systems for the government stood out. The reality is payroll should be executed by payroll specialists. I recently had to research payroll providers and there are players who service 20-30% of the Canadian population already. This is another sign of folks not knowing how to source, design, oversee or implement software implementations.

This is also why Ceridian is still around in spite of all of their faults (or so I hear from any small/mid-size business practitioners I know). I take it that's who you're referring to?

There's actually a few at that size, Ceridian is one, ADP is another...

Most have their pros and cons but ultimately can handle complex union type payrolls.

Payroll, also is ripe for disruption.

Re: Canada to Scrap IBM Payroll Plan Gone Awry Costing $1B

#32

Post by jellicle »

Incidentally, the error was here:

"The project was meant to save costs by firing 1,200 employees handling payroll at various departments around the country and replacing them with about 500 people in a centralized location using Phoenix to handle most of the government’s payroll needs."

It's not software problems, or not primarily software problems anyway. They fired EVERYONE who knew anything about payroll in the entire Canadian government, all at once, and hired 500 brand new people in one call center to work with the brand new software as it rolled out. The new software doesn't include code for a lot of "special cases" which together represent a lot of cases. The new people have no idea how to solve most pay problems (people problems OR software problems). They get four days of training.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/phoenix-falling-pay-cen...

"Phoenix was supposed to cut our work in half. It actually doubled our work. So, you can't get rid of 2,000 people ... and double the work and expect the work to get done," one said."

Overall, even if the software worked perfectly the execution would have been a disaster.

Re: Canada to Scrap IBM Payroll Plan Gone Awry Costing $1B

#33

Post by rpeden »

cjalmeida wrote: post #15
Murkin wrote: post #10

Would you sign to build a project who's MVP is 260,000 salary calculations with rules poorly documented and spread other hundreds of agencies? Maybe if they started with a subset and slowly built up..

This problem was likely better served by many smaller systems that better fit the specific needs. Government is way too complex to try to cram all rules into a single monolith like Oracle's PeopleSoft.

If what I've read is accurate, the various departments were already served by smaller systems that fit their specific needs.

The intention with Phoenix was to save money by consolidating them all into one. Oops.

At least part of the problem is that projects like this don't end up being awarded to those who are most capable of completing them successfully. Instead, they end up being awarded to companies and consultancies who are experts at shepherding proposals through the RFP process.

Re: Canada to Scrap IBM Payroll Plan Gone Awry Costing $1B

#34

Post by [deleted] »

vidanay wrote: post #22

So, what makes a payroll system at this scale so difficult? On the face of it, there are salary employees and there are hourly employees. How many taxing bodies does Canada have? Federal, provincial, and municipal? Is that a few dozen or a few hundred? Is Canadian tax code crazy complicated that doesn't allow for a rules based system? I'm honestly curious as to how a "simple" payroll system can go so far off the rail…

[deleted]

Re: Canada to Scrap IBM Payroll Plan Gone Awry Costing $1B

#35

Post by dsfyu404ed »

ismail wrote: post #21

I am guessing one of the reasons is probably the software selected... oracle

Oracle/PeopleSoft can do payroll for a defense contractor with tens of thousands of employees across multiple nations.

I think proper configuration is what's lacking in this case.

Re: Canada to Scrap IBM Payroll Plan Gone Awry Costing $1B

#36

Post by mkohler »

vidanay wrote: post #22

So, what makes a payroll system at this scale so difficult? On the face of it, there are salary employees and there are hourly employees. How many taxing bodies does Canada have? Federal, provincial, and municipal? Is that a few dozen or a few hundred? Is Canadian tax code crazy complicated that doesn't allow for a rules based system? I'm honestly curious as to how a "simple" payroll system can go so far off the rail…

http://wiki.c2.com/?WhyIsPayrollHard

Re: Canada to Scrap IBM Payroll Plan Gone Awry Costing $1B

#37

Post by threeseed »

jandrese wrote: post #8
fnordsensei wrote: post #2

It's possible to infer from this that CA ordered an output from IBM, rather than an outcome. IBM can claim that they have indeed delivered the thing that was ordered, while CA remain disappointed that the effect they had in mind is missing. In Canada's defense though, it's sometimes hard to find someone who will even take on contracts of this magnitude. Getting good terms, even more so.

These large government software projects end up costing way more than they should pretty much every time. The process is just broken. There's way too much design by committee and tying the hands of the people who are doing the actual work, preventing them from implementing the correct solution and instead making them implement the one the disconnected-from-reality specification writers decided on. Then they have to g…

This is completely wrong.

The CA government engaged the vendor, IBM, after they had decided on a list of requirements from what they wanted from a solution. In your argument you say that the hands of the people doing the actual work were tied. Well that's the vendor, and so no, their hands weren't tied.

And not sure if you've ever worked at a project like this but the committee meetings aren't expensive. They are basically free. And there often should be far more of them. The real cost comes from major changes in the design too late in the project plan.

Re: Canada to Scrap IBM Payroll Plan Gone Awry Costing $1B

#38

Post by dctoedt »

Reminiscent of the state of Indiana's lawsuit against IBM for allegedly botching a project to automate the state's welfare system — lots of finger-pointing on both sides; the trial court's 65-page decision started out with the words, "Neither party deserves to win this case" [0]. The case has been up to the Indiana Supreme Court already [1]; on remand last summer, the trial court found that IBM is liable for USD $128 million [2].

[0] https://www.scribd.com/document/100544020/Indiana-IBM-Decisi...

[1] http://www.in.gov/judiciary/opinions/pdf/03221601shd.pdf

[2] https://www.indystar.com/story/news/2017/08/07/court-ibm-owe...

Re: Canada to Scrap IBM Payroll Plan Gone Awry Costing $1B

#39

Post by dragonwriter »

vidanay wrote: post #22

So, what makes a payroll system at this scale so difficult? On the face of it, there are salary employees and there are hourly employees. How many taxing bodies does Canada have? Federal, provincial, and municipal? Is that a few dozen or a few hundred? Is Canadian tax code crazy complicated that doesn't allow for a rules based system? I'm honestly curious as to how a "simple" payroll system can go so far off the rail…

> So, what makes a payroll system at this scale so difficult?

Complex pre-existing business rules of a large, sui generis employer (governments, especially sovereign ones rather than localities, often are because the laws that apply to other employees don't apply to them, and the rules that do apply often aren't coherent across-the-board policies determined by a central org focussed on HR, but often are set in special case laws applied to individual subunits of the government by a legislature then operationalized by the HR staff in that subunit) trying to be put in a COTS system make it hard, but probably what makes it most out of control is that the contractor is optimized in maximizing value extracted not efficient delivery and that governments generally suck at overseeing IT contracts (sometimes this is corruption, but it's often just lacking the knowledge and skills to do it effectively at the direct contract management staff level, often complicated by mandated IT contracting frameworks that are based on the underlying assumption that software engineering is basically structurally the same as civil engineering.)

Re: Canada to Scrap IBM Payroll Plan Gone Awry Costing $1B

#40

Post by debacle »

dsfyu404ed wrote: post #35
ismail wrote: post #21

I am guessing one of the reasons is probably the software selected... oracle

Oracle/PeopleSoft can do payroll for a defense contractor with tens of thousands of employees across multiple nations. I think proper configuration is what's lacking in this case.

Oracle costs a lot. It infects your entire stack, from hardware all the way up to personnel, and drastically inflates the cost from end to end.

With no real utility advantage, either.

Post reply on HN