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

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

#91

Post by walrus01 »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #87
walrus01 wrote: post #53

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…

You're missing at least two pieces of incompetence: 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...

yes, it is sort of like a russian nesting doll of incompetence. the fuckups are nested hierarchically inside the earlier fuckups.

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

#92

Post by AndyNemmity »

chime wrote: post #56
zaroth wrote: post #23

Not having ever worked on anything like this, the death knell for these projects must be the inability to ever reduce functionality into a reasonable core set. Basically the 80/20 rule but where there are practically an infinite number of edge cases that stretch the project on indefinitely? You could serve 80% of the payroll burden with software that cost $10m. 90% coverage costs $100m. 98% costs $1,000m. And 100% co…

Having worked on similar things on a smaller scale but higher up the chain, I can tell you the list of possible issues is a mile long. Everything from lack of leadership and conflicting goals to ever-changing scopes and insufficient resources is a candidate for the big blame. A lot of people, organizations, and systems have to work well together to succeed. As techies, we think the technical solution is the most supe…

And, often times that discussion leads to a decision maker saying - that shouldn't be the case, it's your problem, not ours that you can't handle that.

So you end up assigning someone to 8+ hours of work to do it, you also have to end up having 2-4 meetings on the topic, and on and on.

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

#93

Post by blantonl »

dragonwriter wrote: post #76
ismail wrote: post #21

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

I'm certain one of the reasons is that all kinds of things were selected, before getting to the meet of the requirements. Which is typical of large government IT projects, where the order is often: choose some of the technology stack, write an contract opportunity (RFO, etc.) around the chosen technology and a vague (even if stated in terms that seem precise) concept of the requirements, select a contractor, who then…

..and then start backing all that in to existing long standing customer business processes which aren't going to budge.

And then you end up with the OP.

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

#94

Post by kabdib »

blantonl wrote: post #85

The software platform itself, a heavily modified version of Oracle’s PeopleSoft program ... 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?

When I last "dealt with" PeopleSoft, the standard operating procedure was:

1) Pay PeopleSoft/Oracle a metric f--kton of money.

2) A CD arrives in the mail. (This little envelope cost $800,000?)

3) Your PeopleSoft consultants show up, laugh at that CD (tossing it into the microwave) and pull out their own distros with a zillion customizations that they proceed to spray over your servers. You have no idea what they are actually installing.

4) You get out a firehose, fill it with money, and keep showering the consultants with cash until you are sure they won't succeed in delivering anything worthwhile, and you fire them.

I was only installing a local test instance of PeopleSoft (to do some integration work with another product). Somehow the PS consultants in the area got wind that someone in my company was doing an install, and I started getting all kinds of cold calls offering customization and optimization, with some of the most condescending and customer-hostile attitudes I've encountered. PS had pretty a pretty shitty ecosystem 15+ years ago, and it doesn't sound improved. I'd hate for anyone nontechnical to be at their mercy.

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

#95

Post by AndyNemmity »

microcolonel wrote: post #41
zaroth wrote: post #23

Not having ever worked on anything like this, the death knell for these projects must be the inability to ever reduce functionality into a reasonable core set. Basically the 80/20 rule but where there are practically an infinite number of edge cases that stretch the project on indefinitely? You could serve 80% of the payroll burden with software that cost $10m. 90% coverage costs $100m. 98% costs $1,000m. And 100% co…

Also there's a good chance that the decision to go with IBM as a vendor, and the conduct thereafter, was corrupt from the start. That would go a long way toward explaining why so little due diligence was observed in assessing whether or not to continue the project with them at any of the stages it could've been. Yes, people do make huge blunders in powering forward with overpowered, unnecessary solutions to problems…

At the same time, "Nobody got fired for choosing IBM" is a statement for a reason. If you hire someone else, people will say, "Why didn't you hire the best?"

If you hire IBM, you're avoiding that reasoning, even if on any given project IBM or other large enterprise vendors may not be the best.

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

#96

Post by smnrchrds »

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…

> How many taxing bodies does Canada have? Federal, provincial, and municipal?

For payroll tax, only federal and provincial. Municipalities can only collect property tax, not sales or payroll tax. So, all in all, 14 tax jurisdictions (1 federal, 10 provincial, 3 territorial).

If they were also handling payroll for diplomats and other Canadian employees in other countries, this number could be significantly higher.

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

#97

Post by AndyNemmity »

dragonwriter wrote: post #39
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 specia…

Corruption is often brought up, and I'm not saying it doesn't happen, but any time I've been consulting, it's always general issues, personal issues, technical issues, refusing to change, all sorts of standard stuff. Not corruption.

It's hard to implement even a minor thing in a large company.

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

#98

Post by tw1010 »

This reminds me of the part in the Robert Moses biography when he was made responsible over implementing a more meritocratic employee review system for the government. Just like this story, that one also ended in flames, though Moses made it out all right in the end. I wonder who the Moses character in this story was, and if we'll read about it in a biography in a few decades.

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

#99

Post by AndyNemmity »

j45 wrote: post #88
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…

Decades of different payment rules are anything but simple. 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, bu…

Let alone all the country specific rules. Just that is impossible to deal with properly.

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

#100

Post by alxlaz »

didgeoridoo wrote: post #3

The name is just too perfect: https://www.amazon.com/Phoenix-Project-DevOps-Helping-Busine... To that point, I’m wondering if all IT initiatives codenamed “Phoenix” are doomed from the start, given that the implication is “let’s burn down everything we have that works, and rise anew from the ashes”...

> To that point, I’m wondering if all IT initiatives codenamed “Phoenix” are doomed from the start

Firefox seems to be doing pretty well :-).

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