81–90 of 333 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The way this article was written was really weasely. > The Phoenix project was originally chosen by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Conservative predecessors This is assigning blame to Trudeau in the weirdest way.
It sounds like it's blaming his predecessors?
Canadian here. This has become a huge political football. People are blaming the current Liberal government, when the project was started by the Harper Conservatives. The full extent of just how fucked up it is has just now become public knowledge. It is also a political pork barrel project. > The project was meant to save costs by firing 1,200 employees handling payroll at various departments around the country and…
The way this article was written was really weasely. > The Phoenix project was originally chosen by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Conservative predecessors This is assigning blame to Trudeau in the weirdest way.
As a Canadian who has worked at IBM, I'm not surprised that this didn't find success. In IBMs defense, I don't believe our public sector has the experience or aptitude required to act as a supporting interface for a job of this scale. With that being said, IBM isn't a successful technology company with a proven record building good software products. They were an unwise choice from the get-go. IBM is a successful fin…
Except at $250-350/hour, below average performance is more profitable than successful and a lot of good people suffer on both sides.
What implementation of Peoplesoft isn't heavily modified?
Adapting business processes to COTS software packages is extremely challenging. Anyone remember the absolute bank that Peoplesoft consultants made back in the day when ERP and Business Process Re-engineering was all the rage?
New Zealand in the 90's was trying to have an integrated policing system designed by IBM which burnt a lot of money (in the order of 100 million) and was abandoned [0]. I was working with one of the companies that came along to replace one part of the system with a much smaller component that just handled that individual piece and vividly remember the meeting with the IBM team. They had no code to show me, but they h…
I remember interviewing a BA (business analyst) who had just come off of the INCIS project. She said their entity model was enormous, with tens of thousands of entities.
I couldn't understand how any project could have so many entities, let alone how anyone would ever hope to code up such a thing.
She said the commandment to the analysts was to model everything so they did, just like they learnt in data modelling 101.
So (INCIS was a project for the NZ Police), e.g.:
- A police station has zero or more cells
- A cell has one or more doors
- A door has one and only one key
- A door has many bars
Another data point in INCIS - my sister at the time worked in the police. Her workplace ran out of pencils (they did a lot of note taking with pencils and paper). INCIS had so thoroughly depleted the police's budget that there was nothing left for...say.. computers with email and the like.
Canadian here. This has become a huge political football. People are blaming the current Liberal government, when the project was started by the Harper Conservatives. The full extent of just how fucked up it is has just now become public knowledge. It is also a political pork barrel project. > The project was meant to save costs by firing 1,200 employees handling payroll at various departments around the country and…
1: the long gun registry was also a huge failed massively over budget project, so using the same people for Phoenix...
2: the long gun registry project was relocated from Ottawa to rural New Brunswick. Any competent civil servants switched to other departments to avoid the move. Only the civil servants without other options made the move...
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…
Imagine people hired over the last 50 years. Each at a different rate, pay scale, union, non-union, some people in a position have certain perks, some don't, and it all varies from region to region, province to province, department to department of the government.
I recently oversaw a payroll transformation project in Canada for an energy co at a smaller, but most complex scale according to the payroll vendor.
A few key problem makers add to the payroll mess;
- Accountants and their spreadsheets who think adding one little tweak here or there isn't a big deal. They create so much technical debt. It's not realized, until 10 or 20 simple tweaks on top of each other, and then have to interpret them relative to labor or union rules of each province. Accountants are not a vision of innovation. You will hear many just talk about having to do "manipulations" of data to get it how it should be and quickly losing vision that computers are good calculators and followers of instruction.
- HR / Payroll practitioners do not have enough digital skills on average. Either they can't do the excel work and feel threatened, or do have the excel skills and feel threatened. Either way, change management is a constant threat.
- No one knows how to successfully procure, implement and roll out software as a non-technical manager. Whether it's accounting, hr, payroll, sales, every position is becoming digital first, and the powers that be are not. It's a good case as to why CTO's are needed reporting to CEO's who get the big picture.
Payroll othherwise, is a neat problem on it's own. In my case, the project ended up implementing a larger vendor of payroll that did a decent job that was saved by preparations we made at the CTO level.
Before selecting a vendor, a payroll script capturing the rules for all employees in all regions to calculate everything was developed in-house. It took months of hardening at a few payrolls per month. Using this in-house payroll tool, and not wishing to update it, it was used to hold the screws to the payroll vendor if their output didn't match. Hilarity inevitably ensued.
If someone built the stripe of payroll, it would be something.
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…
For example, in the private sector, if my boss goes away on a 2 week vacation, usually the boss might delegate someone to answer questions and possibly run meetings... but that delegated person doesn't get paid more.
However, the public sector unions have negotiated that the delegated person get a pay bump for those 2 weeks only while the boss is away.
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
In the end, it seems a bit like "why is $social_network hard" I mean, why is it hard to show my my social graph?
And the answer is: it isn't. The issue is building a system that deals with everybody's social graph. Because you have in your social feed one person that has few friends (easy), that other person that is followed by several people and they leave lots of comments (and you are loading their information when the post is shown - and of course there's no way of sharding that so your info can be read from one shard exclusively) and everybody has their list of blocked persons, other permissions than on top of that you have things like "algorithmic reordering", prioritization, paid promotions, etc