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

1. Problems are far bigger than the specific payroll software system. There were tens of thousands of outstanding cases in 2015 before the new system went live. There were tens of thousands of outstanding cases in 2012 when the project started. And there were tens of thousands of outstanding cases every year before that on the "old great system". (why? read on)

2. IBM didn't create a new system from scratch - Govt chose PeopleSoft HCM, an industry-leading system which reliably pays people day in and day out at thousands of customers. Base solution is not the core issue.

3. When you buy PeopleSoft (or SAP, or JDE, or whatever), ideally you make your business fit the system's best practices, customize as little as possible. No client fully does it, but govt doesn't even try. IBM, together with govt employees, spent five years trying to hammer several tens of thousands of complex time and labor rules from more than hundred labour agreements into the system.

3. Implementing this system was half of the initiative, other half was reducing workforce for compensation advisers and moving them all to NB, hiring new grads as replacements. Who were surprisingly not exactly intimately familiar with these hundred labor agreements and tens of thousands of time and labour rules. We're talking one third of the support force at one tenth of experience.

4. So, the billion wasn't spent on "the system". It was mostly spent scrabling afterwards to re-hire old CA's as expensive consultants and trying to catch up the damage.

5. Because guess what, garbage in, garbage out. If your manager doesn't submit or approve your acting gig or leave of absence or maternity leave for several weeks, or months, or more, system won't magically know about it. Not the old one, not the new one, not some magical future one.

If your HR person doesn't create you as a new employee, you won't get paid.

If you don't submit your overtime slips on time, but instead collect them for 10 months so you can have "Xmas bonus", that also MAY just may create an issue. Ditto with retirement applications. Secondments to other departments. And if through this all employee groups perform denial of service attacks on the system because this is all a political game, that may also be a problem.

There is a pervasive cultural issue that boggles mind as to why nobody does their HR things on time or correctly there. The system just provides useful target of the moment, but issues were there before and without cultural change they'll be there in the future.

There are real problems and there are real people suffering because of them, and they have for decades, and yes it's gotten worse. Grandstanding over some magical new systems won't fix it though.

This is a burner account, I had the dubious privilege of working on this few years back and am aware of some of the horror stories - from the present and the past. I'll stay the dear heck away from Federal Govt / Public Sector project in the future if I can.

https://www.itnews.com.au/news/queenslands-ibm-ban-lives-on-...

ACCURACY: One of the biggest things I learned is that a correct payroll isn't a correctly executed payroll, but one that the employee is paid correctly. What's the difference? A lot of payrolls have a ton of manual adjustments to fill the gaps, which never easily get codified. If the barrier to codifying rules could be improved, it would pretty easily start to push around mainframes.

AUDITING: Existing platforms like Ceridian and ADP appear to do an okay job with their auditing - any calculation set to be done by a computer, rule, or human is forever recorded on the same leger. For what I saw, it was a healthy paranoia of tracking how everything is calculated for liability's sake. Faving this available, for repairing data and fixing payrolls is more important than reliably executing incorrect rules, or data. It creates a great audit trail for weeding out behavior.

I'm in no way endorsing one product, but I was reasonably surprised by ADP's newish workforce platform. Of course, once we got into the weeds, things broke and and processes needed to be hacked or split up, but it was only because the ancient mainframe underpinning could not be touched. Which sucked.

If Teyve said in Fiddler on the Roof, all traditions were new once. Maybe all new mainframes were new once.