Univ. of Wisconsin's 30-Year-Old Payroll System Needs a $40 Million Fix

jaroslav writes "The University of Wisconsin is attempting to update a payroll system they have had in place since 1975, but spent $28.4 million in a 2004 attempt with no results, and now is experiencing new overruns in cost and time after 'not hav[ing] the full picture of how complex this project would be.' The current estimate of the redesign is $12 million and years of further work on top of the money already spent."

Comments

Peppy

[Slartibartfass]

Peppy: Do a 30-Year-Old Payroll! spend $40 Million twice

Re:Peppy

[Anonymous Coward]

Kinda like some other recent fiscal rationalization I've observed:

$700+ billion for "bailouts" of important so-and-so's is OK because we spent more than that in Iraq.
Spending $800+ billion on "stimulus" is OK because we spent more than that in Iraq.
$1 Trillion in new health coverage for 43 million uninsured is not a problem because we spent that much in Iraq.

Make No Mistake! (tm)

Re:Peppy

[Anonymous Coward]

$1 Trillion in new health coverage for 43 million uninsured is not a problem because we spent that much in Iraq.

That $1 trillion is over 10 years. Making it about a quarter as much as we spent on the military during peace time under a Democrat. Which is weird since it seems easier to kill than to heal.

Re:Peppy

[shadow349]

$1 Trillion in new health coverage for 43 million uninsured is not a problem because we spent that much in Iraq.

I realize that asking someone to RTFA is a little much around here, but if you did read any of the news stories on the proposal, you'd know that the trillion dollar "universal" health care doesn't cover about 35 million people; it only adds coverage for about 13 million.

Second, as much as you want to compare to the Iraq war, at least common defense it is a Federal responsibility specifically laid out in the Constitution. Universal health care? Not so much.

Re:Peppy

[gb506]

Why bother explaining it to them, Shadow? Their worldview is so ass-backwards you'll never make any headway. We'll just have to sit back and watch until enough of them have had to wait for months or years for a medical procedure they can get on-demand now for them to come around. Canadians facing long waits or poor care have an option now, they can come to the US for treatment, and they do. When we socialize our healthcare, there'll be no place for us to go. We're about to taste a gigantic shit sandwich.

Re:Peppy

[Minion of Eris]

Sorry to dis-aillusion you, but take a look at NU standard of living data - we actually have quite good health care up here. There is a lot of scare mongering about "long waigts", and in some of the bigger cities you might have to wait a few hours if you walk into emerg. without a critical condition. But I don't have to reach into my pocket to pay for a visit to a clinic or my physician. And when my mother had to spend a month in the hospital, we did not have to mortgage her house. And - best for last - if you come down with a serious illness up here, you won't ever get told "sorry, you you don't have insurance, go somewhere else to die." Last time i went to a hospital, I was treated within 2 hours - and it was a non-life threatening injury. seeing the guy wheeled in on a stretcher, covered in blood, it was no problem letting him go first (they call that "triage"). Get the facts.

Re:Peppy

[Minion of Eris]

Sorry - make that UN data (too much blood in caffeine system this morning).

Re:Peppy

[gb506]

If the Canadian health care system doesn't have a piss-poor record regarding waiting lists and unavailable procedures, why do so many Canadians visit US hospitals for treatment? The good old American hospitality? The "fact" is that wealthy people in countries w/ socialized health care find a way to opt out and get decent care elsewhere - from private health care providers if they are allowed by the govt, or from private providers abroad if they don't. And they opt out because they know that with a single payer system comes qualitative and quantitative decline. In the end it's only those who are not wealthy who need to deal with the mediocrity (or worse) that invariably arrives with socialized medicine.

The insidiousness of socialized medicine (or socialized anything) is that no matter how terrible the results may be, once it's implemented it is almost impossible to do away with. Look at the massive Ponzi scheme that is American Social Security for an apt example.

Re:Peppy

[Retric]

No single country has the best treatment for all diseases. Rich Americans often leave the US to seek treatment in other countries. When scheduling a procedure more than 2 days in advance you can basically go to any hospital in the world. The real problem is not the peek quality of the US healthcare system it's all the gap's which kill people.

PS: People also spend over a million dollars to buy a car, suggesting that some people spend a lot of money on something says little about utility.

Re:Peppy

[gb506]

"No single country has the best treatment for all diseases. Rich Americans often leave the US to seek treatment in other countries."

It is quite rare for Americans to seek medical care abroad and typically it only occurs when the Federal government has failed to recognize or authorize a specific type of treatment for use in the US, not because the quality of care is questionable, and certainly not because the timeliness of the care is a problem. Conversely, Canadians often seek care in the US precisely due to quality and timeliness problems in Canada. My former boss, who is a native of Montreal, was so fed up with the poor care and long waits his mother was experiencing with her breast cancer care in Canada that he brought her down to Pittsburgh to be treated. The oncology departments in Montreal are second rate, understaffed, and underfunded. And that is a direct result of the Canadian socialized system. It's sad that socialized medicine, which is usually brought into being under the guise of compassion, ends up causing avoidable suffering.

While not Canada, I have some experience with and understanding of the socialized health care milieu in the UK. There are entities there which are set up expressly for the purpose of lobbying government lawmakers and bureaucrats in an attempt to get them to authorize treatments and drugs. This happens in any country, but in the UK new therapies are routinely rejected solely based on cost, with the result being that, if you're not able to afford private care, you're not getting those treatments no matter how effective they are because some government bean counter had decided it's not worth it.

Granted, US insurance companies refuse to pay for drugs or procedures in some cases, but the key point here is that Americans can choose another insurance plan to get the type of care and access to treatments they desire. Under single payer, socialized medicine, a person only has options if they're wealthy. Normal folk are at the mercy of the bureaucrat hack.

"When scheduling a procedure more than 2 days in advance you can basically go to any hospital in the world."

This assertion is simply untrue. Ask suffering Canadians on waiting lists to get hemorrhoid surgery if they can call their local hospital and request surgery in 2 days.

"The real problem is not the peek quality of the US healthcare system it's all the gap's which kill people."

We in America may have 40 million without health care insurance, but if you discount illegal immigrants, young, healthy people who decide to spend their money elsewhere, and the stupid, the number becomes relatively small. The uninsured argument is a canard that's artfully used by the left to promote attacks on the free market.

Re:Peppy

[Fox_1]

And why do so many Americans come to Canada and lie to get basic medical treatment?

Here's the deal:
Most Canadians would rather not get stuck in some American hospital bankrupting themselves for survival. So most of us don't go to the US for care.

The thing about Waiting Lists is that because we have regular contact with our doctors (free contact) we can identify issues early on. It's called Preventative Medicine, rather than addressing problems after they happen, we identify them before they start. It sucks to wait 9 months for a knee replacement, but that knee problem was spotted potentially months earlier for a Canadian as opposed to an American who may have waited until they were forced to go to an expensive doctors visit because their knee doesn't work.

However there are some treatments that are more developed in the US, some of the *rare* cancer treatments. That's because there are 300million Americans, allowing for more specialization in health problems that affect a very small .00001% of the population.

And here's the kicker: Our Socialized medicine will pay for Canadians to go to the US for these treatments when they aren't offered here.

Some Canadians aren't going to the US for rare treatments though. There are also some who feel that good enough Health Care isn't fast enough. They spend their own dough in the US, saving my health system money and generally showing their stupidity.

And then there are the Boobs. I'm hard pressed to find anything comparable to the Beverly Hills Plastic Surgeon in Canada. Of course Socialized medicine shouldn't be buying Boobs as a general rule of thumb.

-------
What it really comes down to is LIFE EXPECTANCY
You can shout to me until your blue in the face that the United States has a superior Health Care system than Canada. It's certainly more expensive per capita, but 2 years after you're dead I'll still be here laughing.

Re:Peppy

[publiclurker]

I don't see how even the most warped neocon can consider the invasion of Iraq based on lies in order to seize their oil and help shrub pretend he's a man in the eyes of his daddy can be considered common defense. Then again, reality seems to be a more leftist concept.

Re:Peppy

[publiclurker]

I see you've taken to trying the usual blame the victim and dirty foreigners attacks. Don't you think you could try thinking a little bit instead of cutting and pasting from some right wing rag. For one thing, try a little search and you will find a lot of people go to other countries because the simply cannot afford treatment here, unless you are going to try to claim with a straight face that India is so much better than the US at hip surgery. You might also want to actually ask some Canadians about their insurance. Granted they are foreigners in your eyes, but most of them actually speak English, and would be willing to set you straight.

Re:Peppy

[gb506]

"And why do so many Americans come to Canada and lie to get basic medical treatment?"

Because you give it away for "free"? I don't agree with that practice, scumbags exist.

"And here's the kicker: Our Socialized medicine will pay for Canadians to go to the US for these treatments when they aren't offered here."

So you lament the fact that individuals from the US scam your system to get "free" health care, but you have no problems with the fact that your system appears to be designed to keep costs in check by sponging off the more robust health care apparatus in the US? That's pretty rich. What will you do when some American bureaucrat decides to cut the treatments you get in the US? You'll go without, that's what. Sounds great!

Re:Peppy

[gb506]

I didn't copy/paste anything, and I don't think foreigners are dirty. To insinuate such things is insulting and stupid. Look, if you prefer to have fewer health care options that take longer to get, that's your business, but don't assume that I want that for me and my family, because I don't.

Re:Peppy

[Fox_1]

Well there's always Switzerland, they have some incredible medical treatments. They wouldn't mind us sponging, especially since we do pay our own way. Or any of the other westernized countries with modern medicine. Just like other countries send patients here for medical procedures and treatments that they don't offer. It's a small world now, and reciprocity is an understood concept.

But really the fact is regardless of the style of medical care or health system offered, because the US is a large, educated, wealthy, populous, first world nation, it will always be a natural aggregate point for advanced medical techniques.

It doesn't matter how you pay for it, in the end medical advances will continue.

I don't begrudge those citizens of the US that lie to get Canadian health care (sometimes for things as simple as the flu). I do sincerely wish that there were better options for them. I suspect a lot of Canadians think like that.

I was wrong when I said I'd be laughing two years later, that was cruel and I'm sorry. The reality is I mourn all unnecessary deaths.

Re:Peppy

[Anonymous Coward]

The first step on the road to recovery is admitting you have a problem.

I dont understand.

[Anonymous Coward]

How can an upgrade cost $40m?

Re:I dont understand.

[DrLang21]

Depends on the scope of the project. In this case, it sounds like poor project planning resulted in inadequate investigation or documentation of requirements. So the initial fix which was probably a huge effort for a very large employer to have tailored to their needs, deployed, validated, and then integrated without hiccups. I don't know if $28.4 million was unreasonable to the situation, but don't underestimate the cost of deploying a highly secure, stable, expandable, and usable system without interruption. Not to mention the cost of training payroll employees and IT on the new system. This isn't just a simple upgrade. This is a complete overhaul that is probably expected to last for decades.

Re:I dont understand.

[Brian Gordon]

Yeah, it should be deploying a system, not writing one from scratch for every university out there.

Re:I dont understand.

[Ex-MislTech]

An upgrade can cost as much as nepotism will allow in a
system that is filled with cronyism and corruption.

What we have is a race to loot as much as can be looted
while the ship has not yet sank beneath the waves.

We have several 100 trillion in derivatives looming in
the distance that damn few will even write about in the media.

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/derivatives-are-the-new-ticking-time-bomb

We have The Fed printing 9 Trillion and handing it out, but when
asked where it went they respond "I don't know".

http://www.drudge.com/news/121850/fed-inspector-general-claims-9-trillion

Poof the magic fairies ran off with it and now the american
tax payer is in debt for it even though we forgot to write
it down, aren't you glad we are not your accountant ?

The payroll system could prolly be replaced with a canned solution
by numerous vendors, or an open source one that is already available
could be scaled up with the help of some post grad students.

Like the giant ponzimonium that is about to be unleashed it is
is just another of the many thefts thru corruption that are
running amok.

http://money.cnn.com/2009/03/20/news/economy/fraud_ponzi.reut/index.htm

We have yet to see this mess really unspool.

Re:I dont understand.

[eyrieowl]

First, it's not really $40m, it's only $40m b/c they're doing it 2x. It's closer to $20m.
And...it's not just upgrading, as pointed out. It's a complete new system. Any system as old as their previous system is probably in need of replacement rather than simply refactoring and basic updating.

I just did some back of the envelope calculations. So...outside firm bids. Let's say that we'll have 24 minions (basic programmers, project management, requirements, documentation, etc). We'll say they average $70k/year salary. We'll double that for overhead, so $140k/minion/year in salary & overhead ($3.36 mil). Let's say those 24 minions have 8 middle management/tech leads/etc on top of them. We'll say they make on average $100k/year, so $200k/year/manager ($1.6 mil). Finally, we'll say there are two top dogs (architect, partner) on the project. We'll be conservative and put them at $150k/year ($600 k). Now everyone is going to need computers. Let's say $2k/computer ($72 k). This new system isn't going to run on their old hardware, so we'll get them new fancy hardware for $10-$15 million. Finally, the good folks in the payroll dept at the university need new hardware as well to use the new system, so we'll put them down for 20 computers at $2k each as well ($40 k). Grand total is between $15.7-$20.7 million. Granted that this is still less than the $28.4 they actually spent, but clearly there was some overcharging and incompetence going on, so we'll put the extra $8+ million down to false-starts and other poor decisions made by the consulting firm. And, when you're all said and done, the simple project ends up being quite expensive. I have no way of knowing how my cost breakdown compares to how their money was spent, but it makes reasonable sense.

Re:I dont understand.

[brusk]

Don't forget, in an organization the size of a state university, you need to do a massive amount of training. Hundreds, probably thousands of administrative and clerical staff will need to be retrained. That means (a) you probably need to add to your estimate of how many staff are needed for the project and (b) there is a cost across the whole institution in terms of lost productivity during the transition (both people away getting trained and lower efficiency as they start using the new system).

Re:I dont understand.

[nicolas.kassis]

I'd be surprised if they had that many programmers, my experience with university ERP stuff points to much less than that. More managers and trainers, and they probably already have what they consider enough (as in upper management) sys admins on staff anyway. They are outsourcing this stuff so, you have the profit margin to consider.

Re:I dont understand.

[jonbryce]

Is there any reason why they couldn't use the US equivalent of http://shop.sage.co.uk/payrollprofessional.aspx ?

Re:I dont understand.

[knightghost]

I'm doing that same thing for $3.2m right now.

Re:I dont understand.

[knightghost]

How in the hell do you spend $15m on a server? Try 1/10th that.

Re:I dont understand.

[DrLang21]

I see no indication that this software is at all up to the task for the needs of a large employer with well over 1000 employees, most with direct deposit, some with multiple accounts, and most with both 401a and 403b contributions that might be changed from day to day by the employee. The system requirements that they spec would be laughable for the volume of transactions that you could expect on a large university's payroll system.

Re:I dont understand.

[eyrieowl]

Did I say that? No. I said "fancy new hardware". And it goes like this: "Hi, Mr. Doesn't-Know-What-You-Really-Need-From-U-Wisconsin, let me tell you what you need: you want a solution that is going to last you another 20 years, right? So we need to get you a cluster of fancy machines. These babies are really good, they're probably more than what you need right now, but you need a solution which is going to keep your new system up and running for the next 20 years, you need something with room to grow, not a solution which you're going to outgrow in 2 years. Now, we're going to set up a cluster of 4 of these in production to help make sure that you are safe in case any one of them breaks. And we're going to need another 2 for testing and development to make sure that we can test any new fixes or changes without disrupting production. Why not as many as production? We'll, we're trying to save you some money. Well, yeah, it won't let us *exactly* duplicate the production environment, and of course that would be better.... Okay, sure, so, we'll say 4 for testing as well. So that's 8 machines total. And of course your data is critical, so we're going to recommend this SAN storage device to store this highly critical information on. And you'll want 2 of those, one for production, one for testing. Oh, and here's a good tape backup solution so we can make sure that you have quality backups of all that critical information."

I mean, just saying.... The other folks are probably right that perhaps my staff estimates were low, perhaps more trainers (which I'd put in my worker bee category), more managers. So that would drop the hardware cost down a bit, but I think it's very easy to come up with a scenario where someone gets sold WAY more hardware than they need. And could that cost $10+ million? You betcha! :)

That's a nice budget you got there

[xdor]

I would totally sign up to do this job.

Re:That's a nice budget you got there

[DeweyQ]

That's what I was thinking. Four good coders could "do-over" a payroll system in five years no matter how complex it was... at the rates the University is apparently willing to pay and the timeline they have settled for, that is $10 million each for five years of work. Not bad.

Re:That's a nice budget you got there

[Nutria]

Four good coders could "do-over" a payroll system in five years no matter how complex it was

Sure, if you have good specifications.

Re-engineering a 30 year old system that's been accreting features for 30 years, though, isn't an easy task.

Re:That's a nice budget you got there

[CorporateSuit]

Re-engineering a 30 year old system that's been accreting features for 30 years, though, isn't an easy task.

for $10M per dude, it doesn't have to be. I'll bugfix this thing with badgers gnawing on both my arms for that kind of pay.

Re:That's a nice budget you got there

[b0r1s]

4 coders ignores the fun parts defining requirements, assigning tasks, testing, QA, regression testing, all the fun things that the first group neglected that caused it to be unfinished.

Sometimes youngsters look at a task and go "That's easy, I could totally do that in 2-3 months". Then there are people who have done it who stand back and laugh at them for being naive.

Re:That's a nice budget you got there

[hezekiah957]

I call the right arm. Maybe I'll get a mouse to go with the deal. (I'm a 3rd-year CS major at UW-Madison)

Re:That's a nice budget you got there

[Darinbob]

At a certain point you throw out the word "redesign" and substitute "design from scratch". I imagine there are decent off-the-shelf starting points compared to 30 years ago.

Of course, as in any payroll system, it needs to be highly customized so a big chunk of costs will go to the consultant and professional services.

Re:That's a nice budget you got there

[DeweyQ]

With agile methods and a multi-disciplinary team ("good coders" is an unfortunate catchall phrase I used to mean people who can gather requirements, write user stories, validate, iterate, manage a burndown list, etc.), five years would be absolutely more than enough time to do all of the steps you mention and more... like change management and getting iterations into stakeholder hands early... and on and on. I am neither a youngster nor naive about the software development life cycle (both waterfall which is what it sounds like you're used to, and agile).

Re:That's a nice budget you got there

[Lord Ender]

This is true. What they need to do is simplify their payroll policy. Then they could use a much cheaper system--possibly even COTS + a consultant.

Re:That's a nice budget you got there

[fatalwall]

the problem is if its going to cost that much and take that long for fix the system they have... why not buy a system thats already production ready.. only issue there would be importing all your data from one system to another. I know data imports can be hard but its a lot easier then trying to fix a system that really should be retired. I know there is also training that has to be done but the time line would be so much shorter and be the same or less money

Re:That's a nice budget you got there

[Darinbob]

Even with specs, the hard part of a payroll system is known all of the tax rules and regulations to start with, then toss in the byzantine local rules such as the pay grades and union seniority rules. Then when this is done, be prepared to change it again each year as the rules change.

Payroll systems tend to have a lot of people on staff maintaining them. Which is why a lot of corporations just outsource it all if they can.

Re:That's a nice budget you got there

[DeweyQ]

Having said all I did about the outrageous waste of money, a COTS (commercial off-the-shelf) solution, even heavily modified is probably the way to go (and from other comments it sounds like this latest $12 million will go to a Peoplesoft implementation). Still some pretty sweet coin for Accenture, the consulting company that's doing the COTS implementation.

Re:That's a nice budget you got there

[davidsyes]

I wonder if one or any of these is "extensible":

http://www.sql-ledger.org/cgi-bin/nav.pl?page=features.html&title=Features

http://chasesagum.com/open-source-payroll-time-management

http://news.zdnet.co.uk/software/0,1000000121,39175137,00.htm

Even in:

http://www.compiere.com/industries/

I don't see "Education/Universities/Distributed Academic Education Systems"

Re:That's a nice budget you got there

[DeweyQ]

I mean CIBER, not Accenture, the losers they fired.

Re:That's a nice budget you got there

[FooRat]

You don't have to fully "re-engineer" it. It's a payroll system. You just implement a new one, check how much everyone's getting paid, and put that information in. Unless it has everyone on the planet it's not going to be that expensive.

Re:That's a nice budget you got there

[Anonymous Coward]

the hard part of a payroll system is known all of the tax rules and regulations to start with

The word you were looking for there is "knowing", not "known".

HTH. HAND.

Re:That's a nice budget you got there

[crispin_bollocks]

Yup, that's why Paychex, ADP and many others are worth every penny. Anyone with more than 10 or 20 employees is incurring a lot of overhead doing their own payroll.

Re:That's a nice budget you got there

[CastrTroy]

For the price they are incurring developing their own system, they could probably just outsource their payroll to a 3rd party with an already existing system.

Re:That's a nice budget you got there

[crispin_bollocks]

Common wisdom about MRP systems used to be that yes, you could certainly roll your own - it would take you three years, and you would then own a system three years out of date, and designed for where your company was three years ago. Yeah, you could totally code that in 2-3 months. After a year or two is spent on specification, stakeholder buy-in, budgeting, project planning and all that stuff the suits do. And no, you can't fork the project because you got your feelings hurt!!

Re:That's a nice budget you got there

[Bigjeff5]

This is why projects like this end up costing $40 million after failing with $28 million.

The fact is, you don't know shit about the problem, but you assume you have it all worked out, so you throw out a number and just say go. Then, when you start to realize with it will take to comply with city, local, state, and federal tax laws, as well as privacy laws, laws like S/O, not to mention INTERNAL company payroll needs. It's not too bad if it is a small organization operating in one little area, but as soon as you start crossing boarders of any kind, shit gets fucked up. Laws and regulations you've never even heard of almost certainly apply.

And you have to program it to comply with -all- of it. One little mistake could cost the organization millions.

There is a reason large organizations have teams of accountants/programmers, tax lawyers, accountant/lawyers to deal with this shit. It's not easy.

See my sig, I can't say it better than that.

Re:That's a nice budget you got there

[the_Bionic_lemming]

I'm not a youngster, Been coding "In House development" for over a decade in a large company, and I can assure you, 5 years, 4 coders is overkill for a re-write.

Re:That's a nice budget you got there

[kilodelta]

May not be an easy job per se but what is a payroll system but a massive calculator. But it I do know payroll has to integrate with the general ledger system and that's a big fly in the ointment.

Re:That's a nice budget you got there

[Jodka]

Bingo.

Conform to modern accounting and business practices, purchase COTS and you have solved not one problem but two.

Re:That's a nice budget you got there

[Brian Gordon]

Two words: Excel macros.

Re:That's a nice budget you got there

[magarity]

not to mention INTERNAL company payroll needs
 
I bet you've identified the key problem right here. Instead of a set scale of pay grades I bet there is an maze of different salary and hourly rates that no one can figure out. I further bet that if the school administration first spent 6 months coming up with a streamlined pay scale system and pigeonholed all the employees into it, the new payroll system would be a LOT easier to set up and maintain.

Re:That's a nice budget you got there

[magarity]

so a big chunk of costs will go to the consultant
 
It will, and there's where they made the mistake. They purchased an Oracle product for big bucks and tried to get the lowest bidder to customize it. As a result, instead of spending small bucks they wasted big bucks. It would be humming along by now if they'd had Oracle send people to set it all up but that would have cost big bucks up front.

Re:That's a nice budget you got there

[kilodelta]

Well, yeah. You could link them via ODBC to a MySQL database and then import the data to your GL.

Re:That's a nice budget you got there

[Anonymous Coward]

this is why we need to get rid of 99% of these fucking laws and live in a free society again

Re:That's a nice budget you got there

[Anonymous Coward]

One little mistake could cost the organization millions

Too late it already HAS cost MILLIONS with no end in site...

It sounds like a death march program. A do over is in order. *MANY* people involved with this current fiasco need to be fired. It sounds like ego has run the day. With 'perfection' getting in the way of getting any sort of proper job done.

Im sorry there are MUCH MUCH MUCH MUCH larger organizations out there that have a system in place. You can *BUY* these sorts of systems for much less.

It sounds like they need someone to come in and say 'the buck stops here'. Instead it sounds like they have hundreds of suggestions with all of them going in. With no one saying 'that is the dumbest thing in the world why should I have my guys working for 4 weeks on this 1 feature only *YOU* will use once'.

Perhaps the one you work on is going good. Good for you. But 70% of large projects fail because they 'wanted to get it right before coding anything'. Well they didnt get jack. They need to start small and circle their way out and add in more and more both requirements and code and design. With someone who has enough to say 'thats nice but it doesnt fit and we are going to do it this way'. They need a jerk.

I would bet cold hard cash that is what sort of project it is. I have seen dozens of disasters such as this in my career. I do not work with them. Many times they are totally unwilling to fix anything. In this case it will take the chancellor of the school saying 'it *WILL* be fixed and I am firing the blowhards among you to make it work.' They have toxic people there who are set in their ways and unwilling to do anything just because 'its always been done this way'. This will not happen. Until the whole top of the organization thinks its time to fix it and actually *FIX IT* zip will happen. In that type of organization I doubt anything will ever happen that sort of place is a 'buddy system' where only if you know someone do you get in.

Re:That's a nice budget you got there

[Nutria]

This is true. What they need to do is simplify their payroll policy.

That would be the rational thing to do.

But no one ever accused Universities, especially uber-PC systems like UW, of being rational.

Re:That's a nice budget you got there

[morgan_greywolf]

Actually, amusingly enough, there was a time that Bill Gates would have said "A payroll system? I could code that in a weekend in BASIC!" Which eventually became "s/BASIC/Excel macros".

I have to agree that a payroll system is generally pretty trivial to code. Hell, I probably could whip one up in a weekend in Python + PyGTK + MySQL or Python + Django + MySQL. Hell, gimme a couple of months and I'll have both a GUI interface and a Web interface.

Thing is it isn't that trivial. You have no idea what the actual requirements might be. Does it need to interface with another system (say, an accounting system)? What kind of reports does it need to generate? What does the existing data store look like? Does it need to support legacy records? Is it trivial to import these records into an SQL database? (I doubt it).

Re:That's a nice budget you got there

[Kjella]

I further bet that if the school administration first spent 6 months coming up with a streamlined pay scale system and pigeonholed all the employees into it, the new payroll system would be a LOT easier to set up and maintain.

I'd rather try to handcode it in assembly with a blindfold than renegotiate salary with everybody. Even if you're essentially doing nothing at all you'll have employees and unions reading over it with a fine-tooth comb screaming at everything.

Re:That's a nice budget you got there

[oldhack]

Dream on. Imagine asking your employees to take pay cuts so that the payroll system can be simpler.

Re:That's a nice budget you got there

[ShakaUVM]

Sometimes youngsters look at a task and go "That's easy, I could totally do that in 2-3 months". Then there are people who have done it who stand back and laugh at them for being naive.

Why, because it would take them even less time?

It's amazing how quickly you can get shit done when you know what you're doing.

There's several orders of magnitude of difference between different coders trying to accomplish the same task. One thing that I thought would take a week has taken over a year for me now (working, well, never on it). One contract job that I had at UCSD (paid for by Proctor and Gamble) took a couple months to write, document, and ship.

Nobody told me it was budgeted for 3 to 5 years to accomplish. And no, my $15/hour, 20 hours/week self didn't get any of the difference... I think the Bioeng department there happily pocketed the million or so left over.

Re:That's a nice budget you got there

[Bigjeff5]

Starting out with something sane is the way to go, but generally speaking large organizations aren't initially large organizations. They are small organizations that grow, sometimes splitting off into sub-organizations, sometimes merging with other organizations (creating some nice confusing heterogeny for payroll there, in particular), expanding to new regions, changing structure, etc.

A complete re-organization generally isn't possible without bankruptcy of some kind first.

Re:That's a nice budget you got there

[schon]

Even if you're essentially doing nothing at all you'll have employees and unions reading over it with a fine-tooth comb screaming at everything.

And not just unions - university academic unions.

I worked for 2 1/2 years in a university CS department, and (as one of my co-workers so adroitly put it) they start screaming about "academic freedom" when you talk about changing their parking stall.

Re:That's a nice budget you got there

[interkin3tic]

I'll bugfix this thing with badgers gnawing on both my arms for that kind of pay.

Going to ask a shockingly ignorant coding question: Does that REALLY help?!?

Re:That's a nice budget you got there

[plnix0]

No, that's why (along with many other reasons) we should abolish government.

Re:That's a nice budget you got there

[johnlcallaway]

I remember trying to install a system 15 years ago to replace an in-house system that was very easy to maintain. They wanted to move all of the input down to the departments so they didn't have to fill out forms, so decided to purchase a payroll system (not Peoplesoft). I remember giving the estimate to the general manager of the company, and he literally accused me of bulking up the estimate for job security, we should just be able to 'plug it in'.

My response?? 'Sir ... you can either change the software to pay based on the union contract, or you can change the union contract to match what the current software can do.' There were over a hundred pay types and calculations that the existing software wouldn't do that would require me to write new types and plug them in. i was going to have to modify the labor reporting system to generate data for the new system. Then there were issues like 'Should we reissue badges, or maintain a cross-reference table forever.' since the current employee IDs were not compatible with the new system. There were also reports that were going to have to be generated because it didn't match our accounting system feeds, so I was going to have to manipulate the data in order to get it into the accounting system. Plus all the reports that were needed to go back to managers of employees and other departments.

No ... it wasn't going to cost $12M, or even $1M. But if a company of 1,000 people with only one union contract and salaried workers was going to take 6 months to install, I can't imagine what a University with dozens of unions and who knows how many different pay calculations would take. The requirements gathering alone would take months, then longer to get some sort of consensus on the requirements. No install is ever a true replacement because of all the 'features' everyone wants to have.

And a system that size I would never trust to the coders to test. You would need a decent sized QA team to run initial functional tests then increasingly more complex integration tests. And that is before you even get to the parallel test that will probably be required to run for at least a couple of months with data being feed from numerous system and out to other system which will also have to have testbeds setup.

Then having to deal with changing requirements while writing the system, since payroll changes won't just stop because it's going to take a year to design, write, and test it. Union contracts will be redone, new tax laws will come into play.

Sure ... you can parameterize lots of stuff to make it easier to make changes since payroll basically consists of a few basic types of pay, deductions, and disbursements. But you have to be sure that all the possible parameters can be accounted for since adding some in later can be very expensive.

And a 3rd-year CS major would have no clue whatsoever since they have never spent years supporting such systems and don't know what the fuck they are talking about or how complex payroll really is.

Re:That's a nice budget you got there

[msiedle]

Re-engineering a 30 year old system that's been accreting features for 30 years, though, isn't an easy task.

Give me a copy of Microsoft Excel and three months, I'd give them THE payroll system of the future. We could work out the kinks later.

Re:That's a nice budget you got there

[johnlcallaway]

I nominate you to go to all the different unions and get them agree to simplify their pay scales in order to save the University money.

Re:That's a nice budget you got there

[Bigjeff5]

Some companies do this, they'll spend $500k on the system, claim it works, turn it over and razzle dazzle the project manager who signs it, then pocket the remaining $35.5 million. Of course, they don't pocket the $35.5 million after they are done, they pocket it up front and all throughout the project, so that by the end they've spent their $40 million, and then some most likely.

Then when it doesn't work the company just points to the paper the PM signed and says "You said it worked just fine, we're not supporting it any further."

I've got a quarter that says that is how the $28 million failure went.

Re:That's a nice budget you got there

[Anonymous Coward]

Agile is not the solution to everything. Sometimes you cannot do things peace meal.

There are people who realize what agile is - a method to force people to not request a lot of features per clip.

Then you have those who sell it like gold. "It'll solve all your problems. It cannot fail! If it does, it's the peoples' fault!"

Sadly, sometimes it can fail due to a large project just needing to be large and not knowing how to handle that. I sincerely doubt nasa's shuttle os is done via agile.

Re:That's a nice budget you got there

[Blakey Rat]

Yeah, right. I'm assuming at least some of their employees are union-- BOOM, that's the complexity right there. Those contracts are insane.

Re:That's a nice budget you got there

[Martin Blank]

Does it need to interface with another system (say, an accounting system)?

And then all of the follow-up questions to just this one:

Is there an API for the accounting system? If there is one, is it documented? If it is, is it coherent?

What character set does the other system use? If one of the other systems is an ancient program written for an IBM platform and using EBCDIC, you'd better make sure that your programmers know that Unicode isn't going to play happily with it.

I will ask the programmers here one request coming out of the security guys, many of whom are deploying application proxy firewalls:

Please, please, please do not neglect keep-alives if your programs are going to take a while processing things.

The last year where I work has seen multiple programs extend beyond the TCP timeout periods for our APFWs because they don't send keep-alives back within the window (or at all, really). One of them even expected network connections to be held open past the default 7200-second timeout period for TCP connections on the basis that no FIN was sent, so the system shouldn't drop the connection. Not having any experience doing network programming, I have no idea if this is something that should ideally be handled by a system library or if it should be coded by the programmer (can anyone chime in on this?), but it can be maddening to track down on a new app all the time and then have to rebuild all of the evidence to convince management.

Re:That's a nice budget you got there

[nicolas.kassis]

And a 3rd-year CS major would have no clue whatsoever since they have never spent years supporting such systems and don't know what the fuck they are talking about or how complex payroll really is.

That's a really good point. You need domain experts and those aren't cheap for this level of accounting.

Re:That's a nice budget you got there

[knightghost]

Use a modular engine (Oracle Payroll) for unions. Its configuration rather than coding. I ran 52 unions on a system with an average 1 FTE. And you don't need a QA team. One accountant that knows tax and some payroll can do it. BTW, I've worked on payroll implementations for over a decade.

Re:That's a nice budget you got there

[knightghost]

Once you hit about 3,000 people, it is cheaper and much more effective to do payroll in house (unions or no unions). Just have to keep scope creep down. Let the software do the work.

Re:That's a nice budget you got there

[knightghost]

Agile would cost 4x more then fail under its own weight. There are already several payroll systems that can handle hundreds of thousands of people. The project cost comes from all the non-ROI additions and tweaks that takes weeks and months of work.

Re:That's a nice budget you got there

[Anonymous Coward]

wow. you are a world class expert on do-as-little-as-possible employees and their bloated pay packages. i dont know if that is something to brag about.

peoplesoft can and does handle these types of pay packages/worthless jagoff monthly disbursements/drags upon humanity.

having attended both state and private universities, the hardest working/most responsive instructors i ran into were the community college ones. the worst were the unionized state employees. if they did not educate their students, they got fired. simple as that.

Re:That's a nice budget you got there

[Anonymous Coward]

but is that legal?

Re:That's a nice budget you got there

[Anonymous Coward]

Err.. how about offering a pay grade improvement paid out of the saving from not needing this overly complicated new payroll system? Duh.

Re:That's a nice budget you got there

[Facegarden]

this is why we need to get rid of 99% of these fucking laws and live in a free society again

Yup! Nothing says fairness like letting the big guys push everyone around!

Because that's what happens when you eliminate 99% of laws.

This reminds me of all those "punk" people that think everything would be better if we had anarchy...

Uh, yeah, it would be great if there was no transportation system and no police and no judges and everyone with a bigger stick could push me around.

I know that's not exactly what you said (you said 'these' laws, probably meaning crazy tax and payment laws) but just gutting a legal system is never a good idea, it needs to be fixed, not abandoned.

-Taylor

Re:That's a nice budget you got there

[N1AK]

You simply don't know enough about the situation to make that judgement, I've only got a few years project experience and one thing that never ceases to amaze me is how hard it is to envision a project without being involved in it. You may be able to play buzzword bingo with the best of them and stick software lifecycle and project management terminology throughout your post, you may in fact be the creme de la creme in both these fields, but you still know less than a percent of what needs to be known about this job to understand it.

Re:That's a nice budget you got there

[fishbowl]

Why would you write business software with such a down-to-the-wire network protocol?

Is it really that expensive to wrap your data in a document format (xml) and use http (soap)?

Re:That's a nice budget you got there

[Anonymous Coward]

...ignores the fun parts defining requirements...

And understanding the requirements. UW almost certainly receives federal funding, subject to the byzantine federal requirements for the audit functions the payroll system must provide for use by federal auditors. Too many projects include a statement such as "must conform to all relevant federal audit requirements". The four people in the original comment could spend five years gaining the expertise to understand all of those requirements in sufficient detail to design a conforming system. Did you meet all the requirements for interface XYZ, specified in several hundred pages of documents? Can you show the required test logs for the thousands of scenarios the audit sub-system is required to properly support? Did you meet the requirements for physical data security? Did you use one of the allowed techniques for storage redundancy?

There are, typically, a handful of companies that have accumulated the necessary knowledge to actually build systems that conform to the insane set of requirements that state agencies in a given field (education, human services, etc) are subject to.

Re:That's a nice budget you got there

[Anonymous Coward]

See my sig, I can't say it better than that.

I would if I could, but I can't so I won't.

Re:That's a nice budget you got there

[Anonymous Coward]

> It's amazing how quickly you can get shit done when you know what you're doing.

The trouble with these payroll sort of projects is you're not sure what you're supposed to be doing. Someone goes around and talks to "everyone" concerned and hopes "everyone" is telling the truth, knows what they are talking about, and what you are actually asking them, so that you have some vague idea of what you're supposed to be doing, and how they want things to work.

Just that alone takes quite a while.

A few months down the line a bunch of them change their minds. It often doesn't matter even if you got their signature on the requirements - you have to change things, and so the costs go up.

Then you show them a mock-up/prototype, then they spend a week discussing the colour of the "bike shed"... Then they change their minds again.

Often the bottleneck isn't the coder. If the project manager is good and lucky he can "guide" everyone to "want" what is much more easily done ;).

Re:That's a nice budget you got there

[jabuzz]

Offer $$$ though, and most if not all will take it.

At the last university I worked at in the UK, there where a small number of people that for historical reasons got paid in the middle of the month where everyone else was month end. A little application of $$$ in offering all those people a bonus to change to month ending, and you have a simplified payroll you only have to run once a month and everyone is happy.

There is at least $40 million here to ease the pain, plus the lower running costs. There is fundamentally a lack of imagination on behalf of managers here. Not that this surprises me.

Re:That's a nice budget you got there

[Richard_at_work]

Then why not normalise the current situation as to how it actually is - the employees are actually employed by the union, who contracts them out to third party employers? Thats pretty much how it is anyway. Pay the union for the workforce, the union gets the task of handling the complexity of its workforces pay structure.

Re:That's a nice budget you got there

[Dripdry]

"Now... there's nothing but flowers"

I thought parent would be modded Funny. Please see the Talking Heads song mentioned above if you have questions.

Re:That's a nice budget you got there

[Richard_at_work]

In all probability, a large portion of the 'laws' are rules laid down by the unions themselves.

Re:That's a nice budget you got there

[pbhj]

Would you do it if we can't find any badgers ...?

Re:That's a nice budget you got there

[pbhj]

You're telling me no-one has solved this problem yet. Surely someone has a system, used in a similar situation to UW that runs on the same platform and could be sold for substantially less than $40million. Even if it's going to cost that much can they not generalise it and sell it on?

Re:That's a nice budget you got there

[rbanffy]

Better: You could start with something that's already deployed and working on a lot of 60+ employee companies like PeopleSoft.

If a university has such insane requirements, it's time to rethink their processes, not to build the millionth payroll system.

Re:That's a nice budget you got there

[morgan_greywolf]

Not having any experience doing network programming, I have no idea if this is something that should ideally be handled by a system library or if it should be coded by the programmer (can anyone chime in on this?),

Most wire protocols will be handled by some sort of library unless they are custom protocols. Custom protocols can be either down to the wire or they can be written at a higher level (open a socket, write this, read that, close the socket), though the trend these days in business programming is to not use custom protocols at all whenever possible.

Does that answer your question?

Re:That's a nice budget you got there

[DeweyQ]

Fair enough. The project management we did on our multi-year projects was ALWAYS bogged down by non-technical, non-requirement issues like management changes and other forms of "pushback". Again, in five years, you can accomplish just about anything, even with the most complex myriad of tax laws and internal "one-off" rules about pay scales. But you can't do anything if there is A) corruption, B) willful resistance, or C) utter lack of stakeholder buy-in. Any one or all three of these seems to be at work here.

And you're totally right that no one who's been on the outside can know anything for sure. /. is all about arrogant claims and wild-ass guessing isn't it?

Re:That's a nice budget you got there

[Hognoxious]

The odd thing is when people try to rewrite SAP to shoehorn in all that old crud, it allways seems to be the software's fault for being inflexible.

I sometimes think I'm the only one round here that doesn't own Oracle stock.

Re:That's a nice budget you got there

[Anonymous Coward]

"About 40 university employees are also working on the project".

Re:That's a nice budget you got there

[Hognoxious]

Yup, it's just a SMOP

Re:That's a nice budget you got there

[Hognoxious]

You don't have to fully "re-engineer" it. It's a payroll system. You just implement a new one, check how much everyone's getting paid, and put that information in. Unless it has everyone on the planet it's not going to be that expensive.

Curing cancer is a piece of cake. You just need to kill all the cancerous cells.

Ooops, almost forgot. You have to try to not kill too many of the healthy ones.

Re:That's a nice budget you got there

[Anonymous Coward]

We don't need no steenking badgers!

Re:That's a nice budget you got there

[ConceptJunkie]

They probably _are_ doing "COTS + a consultant". That's the sad thing.

Re:That's a nice budget you got there

[Blakey Rat]

Yeah. Because union officials are SO trustworthy.

I get what you're saying, and it's logically correct, but you have to consider the human element here. That's why it's called "human resources." People who mostly deal with software (including myself) should space themselves 10 miles away from anything to do with HR, except for just implementing the extremely precise spec.

Re:That's a nice budget you got there

[stubob]

But that's the problem when working with the government: you have to show ineptitude sufficient to actually spend all the money. It doesn't matter that it could be done for $500k, you have to find ways to spend all the $40m.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to go do 6 months of design modeling before beginning code.

Re:That's a nice budget you got there

[Martin Blank]

For those "higher level" cases, who is responsible for keep-alives? The library or the programmer? Or is it a mix where the programmer needs to call a function in the library?

Re:That's a nice budget you got there

[geekoid]

No, four good coder could not do this project.
Yu also need business analysist, tersters, training, the cost of running to systemes during test the addtional cost for needing more people to help out the regular workers while they are triang the time of the current experts.

4 coder and 5 years would turn out a pile of useless crap.

You are really ignorant on this subjet and really sound like a moron to anyone who has been through this type of upgrade.

I used to think like you, then I was on a large scal financial system project.
100 people, 20 of which were coders and 80 million dollars. 3 years.
20 million of that cost was from the first team that tried it in the style you seem to think it can be done.
Now, we saved that bank over 100Million a year, so many well spent.

Re:That's a nice budget you got there

[geekoid]

1) completly irrelevant to the problem at hand since it is happening in what we like to call 'the real world'
10) You will not be tossing out any pay rules bcause there are there for a reason, and you would get sued for changing thme without changing current contracts.

Your not even taking medical and benefits into the pictures.
Insurance, MERPS, etc . . .

Re:That's a nice budget you got there

[geekoid]

not likely. you could get 5 people to put together a system, even a mostly broken on, for 500K.

Re:That's a nice budget you got there

[Richard_at_work]

The workers have already subjected themselves to the union hierarchy, so its basically their problem already :) Why should the employer be the one to implement the complex pay structures unions demand? Reduce the workforce to a single invoice per period!

Re:That's a nice budget you got there

[Anonymous Coward]

Unions? Most of the complexity comes from the legislature.

Re:That's a nice budget you got there

[frank_adrian314159]

...go to all the different unions and get them agree to simplify their pay scales...

I have a feeling that as long as you pitched it to each one with a positive revenue outcome for every union (and the majority of each union's membership), you'd have little trouble.

Re:That's a nice budget you got there

[FishOuttaWater]

I don't suppose spreading $20M across those contracts would be enough to simplify them. Either in salaries to the workers or, um... a bonus to the Union leadership.

Re:That's a nice budget you got there

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes!!! I worked for a Payroll company and I did a Conversion / Implementation for a Cal Sate college. (Left out specifics for a reason.) If you plan it correctly and simplify their processes, there is no reason why a university should not save money when doing a payroll conversion.

Although working with reports in green bar sucks...

Re:That's a nice budget you got there

[johnlcallaway]

I can't speak for the UK unions, but I know of one instance where an entire factory was shut down for two months because 7 striking workers were charged with vandalism (they had thrown nails into the road that punctured several tires around homes of managers) and the company refused to cave in to demands to drop the charges. In the meantime, the company hired scabs to run the factory from other offices and customers were impressed with the improved quality of product. During this time, the factory continued to produce product while the union workers sat on picket lines and got paid ... nothing. Sometimes, people will get stubborn (or stupid) just because they can.

So what it will 'cost' is a complete unknown, although I do agree it's worth a try. Since we don't know whether or not they tried that, then assuming they hadn't tried due to a lack of imagination is just that ... an assumption.

Re:That's a nice budget you got there

[CorporateSuit]

One word: Modules.

Yes, this project would take $40 million + $100,000+ monthly patches to stay current if it was spaghetti coded. Where everything is hard-coded into everything else. If you set up modules and systems to create modules that won't affect one another if one module is removed and the other remains, or one is altered and the other is not, then you won't run into these sorts of issues. Does it take planning? In the beginning, it's much more technical planning and less project management. In the end, it's much less dependant on project management (You need something to alter janitor's income based on how many credits they're taking this year? Yeah, I'll just write a module for that! You need to make room for janitors who are also TA's? No problem! Oh, so now teachers can start taking percentages of their 401K's....") they take a substantial amount less effort to write and coordinate between different programmers or teams... and it makes it easier to set up a user-friendly interface. That way, if a module needs to be changed, you're working with only x% of the code, instead of tracing codes all the way to nowhere, and instead of shotgun patching everything, you can simply add in modules, and let their consultant arrange them.

Module is not a buzzword. It rivals caffeine as a programmer's best friend when it comes to nightmarish project management.

Re:That's a nice budget you got there

[Lost Race]

To view GP's sig:

1. Find Slashdot account settings link, open settings page.
2. Figure out which subpage controls comment display, open it.
3. Scroll around hunting for the checkbox that controls sig display, toggle it.
4. Scroll around to the "save settings" button and push it.
5. Re-open comment, read sig, discover that it's completely retarded and useless like all other sigs ... oh yeah, that's why they were turned off in the first place.
6. Reverse above process to re-disable sigs.

Thanks, Taco. That's so much better than just showing a member's sig in their user page.

Re:That's a nice budget you got there

[bjourne]

Good advice, except nobody believes you because they always underestimate the difficulty in rewriting an old working system. There is always someone who believes he can write the system better than his predecessors and the cycle repeats itself.

In those cases I always try to get something up and running as soon as possible. Then building from there to avoid having to deal with comparisons between the old and new system. Usually the specification for the new system is "like the old one, except with these extra features" which most often is impossible to realize because you can't replicate all features of the old system. By getting the new one working asap avoids that and you get to know what features are really needed and which features the managers just ask for because they can. This of course requires that the system users are ok with it and that you can negotiate the features with them. E.g. rather change the union contracts to accommodate software changes, than change the software for the union contracts.

That said, in my experience 3 times out of 4 attempts, building a new system isn't worth it. Everyone always overestimate their ability and underestimate the work needed to replace the old one. Not that I would tell anyone that, there is good money to be made in rewriting perfectly functional code. :)

Re:That's a nice budget you got there

[morgan_greywolf]

The programmer would usually specify a flag along the lines of "keepalives=10" to determine if and how often keepalives are sent.

Re:That's a nice budget you got there

[Anonymous Coward]

That is some seriously fucked up shit. I don't care how big your bloody payroll system is. It's a bloody payroll system with a _set of rules_. What are these coders going to do for 5 years, huh? Are they going to hand code all these rules and tax laws into the code?

NO. A real coder abstracts the problem. Then lets the lazy analysts and input monkeys put the rules into the system, using the method that the coders designed. Seriously. If you can't abstract a problem like this, you're not a coder. You're a regurgitating monkey that was taught Java at a tertiary institution.

Re:That's a nice budget you got there

[Martin Blank]

Thank you. I wonder if I'll be able to use this to get them to fix their code now.

Re:That's a nice budget you got there

[Anonymous Coward]

But of course. I know as well as anyone, the university would use that as an excuse to "streamline" everyone else's paychecks down, and the sports and administrator's up. It's the whole point of computers to do complex tasks, the rules should not have to be simplified to accomodate machines!

          If they don't have the chops to write a new billing system, suck it up and buy a newer Z-Series mainframe to replace the 3090 it's probably running on now. Plenty of companies, especially in the 1990s, tried to ditch their mainframes, then found it was cheaper to just keep one running.

O.K. So...

[Anonymous Coward]

The University of Wisconsin is attempting to update a payroll system they have had in place since 1975

Why?

Re:O.K. So...

[magarity]

Why?
 
Probably hard to find parts for whatever vintage 1975 mainframe it runs on. If you only know PC's, imagine trying to buy a brand new VESA bus SCSI card for your legacy 486 mission critical system.

Re:O.K. So...

[0100010001010011]

Virtualize it!

Seriously. VirtualBox-Mainframe edition has to be out by now. Run it a MacMini hidden in someones mailbox. No one will know the difference.

Re:O.K. So...

[rs79]

"Probably hard to find parts for whatever vintage 1975 mainframe it runs on. If you only know PC's, imagine trying to buy a brand new VESA bus SCSI card for your legacy 486 mission critical system.
"

(looks in box)

I have one. Actually I have a few. You want SCSI-I or wide SCSI?

I ship internationally and take paypal. It's WJWD.

Re:O.K. So...

[pbhj]

Virtualise?!?

As a UW Student...

[cheezitman2001]

I just want to say how glad I am my tuition's going to a good cause.

Re:As a UW Student...

[ubergeek09]

as a uw student, or at least I will be this fall it does kinda sicken me, but....I'm not paying my own tuition. I can thank student aid for that. lol

Re:As a UW Student...

[Khan]

As a citizen of the State of Wisconsin, I'm glad to see where my tax dollars are being wasted. Thanks Gov. Doyle and our dumba$$ lawmakers.

Re:As a UW Student...

[Brian Gordon]

Tuition is just a way to trim down their applicant pool. The state pays much more of your tuition than you do.

Re:As a UW Student...

[thousandinone]

Tuition is just a way to trim down their applicant pool. The state pays much more of your tuition than you do.

Don't you mean the taxpayers? Ie, us AGAIN?

Re:As a UW Student...

[Anonymous Coward]

Wisconsin, home of the Badgers, Beer, Bratwurst, and Budget Busting Bloatware.

There's a license plate motto in there somewhere...

Re:As a UW Student...

[schwanerhill]

Tuition is just a way to trim down their applicant pool. The state pays much more of your tuition than you do.

That's a cute one-liner, but if only it were true. The UW-Madison in-state tuition ($8020 for 2009-2010) is about the same as the state subsidy per student ($9379, 2008-2009). This doesn't factor in the additional $8040 per student for room and board. Nonresident of Wisconsin/Minnesota tuition is about $22,000 plus room and board.

Re:As a UW Student...

[TroyHaskin]

Same sentiment here. A single university (UW-Madison) can barely upgrade correctly. And when they do it sucks. Adminstration has no clue what computer systems are and which ones are good for a single University let alone a state-wide system. Good forbid someone walk over to the local CS department (if they even know what that stands for) and ask for advice, or ask if there are a few dozen Grad Students looking for tons of funding (longshot there, but oh well).

Re:As a UW Student...

[multimed]

Here, here. There's never been an elected official I as desperately want to see get bumped from office as Doyle.

Bad Title

[Red Flayer]

Who am I kidding, right?

Their payroll system doesn't need a 40-million-dollar fix. That's just what they've ended up spending on it (hypothetically, once the $12 MM hot cash injection fixes all the problems).

The University should just scrap the system and go with a commercial payroll vendor. Bigger organizations have done the same, and there's no shame in it.

$40 MM is insane. That's over four years of tuition for 4500 students at UW-Madison.

No use throwing good money after bad.

Re:Bad Title

[Crazy Man on Fire]

The University should just scrap the system and go with a commercial payroll vendor. Bigger organizations have done the same, and there's no shame in it.

That's exactly what they're doing. They are trying to switch to PeopleSoft.

Re:Bad Title

[emmons]

As I understand it, they've totally scrapped the old system and are starting over from scratch using PeopleSoft - which they should have done from the beginning rather than trying to roll their own solution.

So yeah the title is misleading; it's a $12 million system. And that includes deployment across 24 campuses statewide, training costs, etc.

Re:Bad Title

[ckaminski]

Solved problem. http://www.adp.com.

Payroll isn't something companies should be specializing in managing. ADP/Paychex are kings in this arena for a reason.

Re:Bad Title

[Red Flayer]

PeopleSoft is not a commercial payroll vendor.

It is an ERP system, the payroll module needs to be heavily customized for any large implementation.

If they need an ERP, fine... but then it's not just a payroll system costing $12 MM additional, is it?

Serves me right for NRTFA, but *some* accuracy could *maybe* be hoped for?

Re:Bad Title

[mmaniaci]

Theres an infinite amount of shame that you accrue once you go to PeopleSoft. I don't know of anything better, but PeopleSoft is a steaming pile of shit, much like any other enterprise tool that tries to do it all. Its all just fodder that managers eat up like hotcakes because of the promise of higher productivity, and won't change until the next generation of IT professionals comes in and kicks the old clods off their thrones. Now that we have a generation of IT professionals that were born and grew up in a world with computers, I have plenty of optimism that enterprise bloatware like PeopleSoft (Microsoft *, Novell, FootPrints, Cadence, etc) will slowly but surely be replaced by modular programs that actually do a task, and do it well.

Re:Bad Title

[Anonymous Coward]

no, people soft should NEVER be used. I've been at two universities which implemented it. both times were an unmitigated disaster and people including myself did not receive my paycheck for over a month. Peoplesoft and their engineers suck in every sense of the word and should NEVER be used.

Re:Bad Title

[Bodhidharma]

The $12m is just for the planning. They originally though $8 million would be enough but it wasn't. The UW payroll system (really HR system) has to take care of around 60,00 employees at several campuses plus county extension branches. There are all sorts of job descriptions with different contracts, vacation, sick leave, seniority, retirement plans, insurance, etc. The previous failure was an embarassment and some reporter figured they could stir up some trouble by making a big deal out of this. It's better that they get all the processes sorted out before they start writing custom code.

Re:Bad Title

[Anonymous Coward]

won't change until the next generation of IT professionals comes in and kicks the old clods off their thrones.

My, aren't we quite the bigot. This is going to come as quite a surprise to you, but, there's a lot of people in the world. Some of those "old clods" are actually intelligent, knowledgeable and experienced in their fields, including IT. Hell, some of them even post on Slashdot, I imagine.

And, at least one of them thinks that, in addition to being a bigot, you're also an asshole.

Re:Bad Title

[duffbeer703]

You still need the ERP. It's not like you get together a box with all of the goofy union contracts and agreements, court-ordered judgements, and byzantine business rules, fedex it to ADP, and magically get your paychecks to come out the other end.

Re:Bad Title

[carlzum]

Yep, this was a $40 million leadership failure. They're trying to blame the IT bogeyman, but according to the article a lack of planning and poor leadership was the problem. The fact that it was a software project is irrelevant, they would have been just as inept if they tried to build a bridge or organize a large event.

The project, a public relations embarrassment for the university, was doomed by poor project leadership and planning, bureaucratic infighting and technical complexity... Giroux said earlier planning budget estimates and timelines had to be changed because "we did not have the full picture of how complex this project would be." He noted a state audit in 2007 of troubled information technology projects identified inadequate planning as the source of most problems.

Re:Bad Title

[Brian Gordon]

Yes the new generation of webcomic-reading, slashdot-posting, console-playing mac users will do a task and do it well.

Re:Bad Title

[vic-traill]

Do you even know anything about perl? -- AC Replying to Tom Christiansen post.

That's the damn funniest .sig I've read in quite a while. Kinda like asking Henry Spencer if he knows anything about Usenet, or regular expressions.

Anyway, as another poster noted, the $12 million is for planning only. And it is up from $8 million in the original budget. I'm pretty impressed - how does the *planning* budget run over by 50%? And w/ a big 'n' to boot - it's not like it bloated from 1k to 1.5k.

Re:Bad Title

[Anonymous Coward]

First the UW adopted the PeopleSoft financials. This has been in place for awhile (my secretary uses it often). It was an adjustment but is going o.k.

Then it's decided to upgrade the HR system and some PHBs at UW-System decide on Lawson HR instead of going with PeopleSoft. Big integration problems (go figure), and iirc, even prior to the Lawson debacle the UW System CIO council came out against it, but the PHBs didn't listen. Project fails...UW takes lots of heat. Starts over now with PeopleSoft HR, finds out needs to do more planning to not repeat past failure. AP comes out with story about being late and over budget again.... when really they're trying not to f-it up again.

Re:Bad Title

[magarity]

I don't know of anything better, but PeopleSoft is a steaming pile of shit ... and won't change until the next generation of IT professionals comes in and kicks the old clods off their thrones
 
Sounds like a great venture capital pitch to me. Let me know when you raise a couple dozen million and we'll get started on our badass pplsft replacement.

Re:Bad Title

[rfuilrez]

Well you should be glad that other people didn't recieve your paycheck. That would be a disaster!

Re:Bad Title

[thousandinone]

Now that we have a generation of IT professionals that were born and grew up in a world with computers, I have plenty of optimism that enterprise bloatware like PeopleSoft (Microsoft *, Novell, FootPrints, Cadence, etc) will slowly but surely be replaced by modular programs that actually do a task, and do it well.

Now that we have a generation of automobile drivers that were born and grew up in a world with automobiles, I have plenty of optimism that traffic jams, drunk drivers, and general automobile idiocy will be replaced by conscientious drivers that actually obey traffic regulations and don't put themselves and other drives at undue risk.

Wait...

Re:Bad Title

[Anonymous Coward]

No kidding. I've worked at companies with 50 employees, and companies with a quarter-million employees - and they both use Paychex. Never had an issue. Why do people try to reinvent the wheel? As soon as they forget to take into account Texas' finance law, Sec 481.32(a)(9)(c) article II paragraph 3 or some other random crap, they're out the entire cost of the system all over again in penalties, lawsuits, etc.

And what happens 30 years from now? They're going to shell out $40 billion to start over again?

Re:Bad Title

[Tablizer]

The UW payroll system (really HR system) has to take care of around 60,00 employees at several campuses plus county extension branches.

Woa, they just started and it's calculations are already off by a factor of 10.
     

Re:Bad Title

[Anonymous Coward]

Come on grandpa, let's change the depends then it's off to bed.

Re:Bad Title

[rs79]

"That's the damn funniest .sig I've read in quite a while. Kinda like asking Henry Spencer if he knows anything about Usenet, or regular expressions"

He lives in some sort of zoo in Tronno. Why would he know anything about that shit?

Re:Bad Title

[fishbowl]

"It is an ERP system, the payroll module needs to be heavily customized for any large implementation."

The same can be said for any payroll system, in any environment that doesn't fit some simple, canned model. I know a thing or two about business software, where I've made my living for most of my life, and in particular, I understand the complexity of a university system payroll.

Some of the posters here seem to have no concept of just how mind-boggling a university payroll administration can be. Even with fully functional automation, it is often a full-time effort involving many individuals, just to have the distributions and deposits done on schedule -- the direct deposit slips aren't even in the mail before you're working on the next pay period.

I've worked in that world. Don't even *mention* the rules with state pensions. Or the paycheck for a faculty member who is both a tenure track professor *and* a contractor *and* an executive of an extension department. (That example is real, my last boss before I left academia.)

The university I worked for is heavily involved in the Kuali project (http://www.kuali.org/communities/kfs/) because the fact of the matter is, there really isn't a COTS solution that fully meets the requirements a university system has for business software. And a university budget does not usually even come close to what it takes to get custom work out of SAP or Peoplesoft or whatever.

You can defend the "30-40 year old system" or "COBOL" or whatever, until some event, such as not being able to replace your AS-400, or when the scale has grown to the extent that the system literally cannot produce a paycheck for everybody in the time available before you're making late payments (and then settling summary judgments due to your failure to meet contractual obligations, I've seen it happen) or your accouting capability no longer meets the requirements of the state (didn't stick around long enough to see that, but I think it's coming.)

I honestly don't know whether Kuali is a "dead on the vine" or "promising project", but certain pieces of it have been used as band-aids to take some of the load off a dying system.

None of this should surprise anyone with ERP experience, since ERP systems have been scaled up in a frankenstein manner for as long as there has been business software :-)

18 million dollars is about right for a four year project with 30 professionals in your core organization. (And in a university setting that includes 200 students, office leases and IT infrastructure.)

Examine the requirements of a state university's payroll system and then think carefully before bidding less ...

Re:Bad Title

[fishbowl]

I would be surprised if even your quarter-million employee company has the payroll complexity, in particular, of a university system.
Just getting the requirements together enough for ADP can be a long, expensive affair.

>Texas' finance law, Sec 481.32(a)(9)(c) article II paragraph 3

Huh? Texas is one of the easier states to do payroll tax for. There's only Federal tax, but some contractors started getting a type of service tax in '88. I remember that because we had to scrap a system to accommodate it, and that's when we started using HP; I got an Apollo on my desk and was told to learn Unix. This was also the first time I ever had a computer that was directly attached to the internet :-P

Re:Bad Title

[dangitman]

Now that we have a generation of IT professionals that were born and grew up in a world with computers,

I dunno, that generation seems to be generally less knowledgeable about computers than those who grew up when computing was in its infancy. Do you think that the generation that grew up with mobile phones is more knowledgeable about radio frequency engineering and communication protocols? They might know how to send a text message, but it doesn't mean they understand anything about the underlying technology.

Re:Bad Title

[Anonymous Coward]

PeopleSoft is the fucking devil. It's so bloated and "feature" laden you can't do anything worthwhile.

Re:Bad Title

[doconnor]

Actually a generation of automobile drivers that were born and grew up in a world with automobiles are much better drivers then those who haven't. The rate of accidents are much higher in developing countries where most drivers are first generation drivers.

Ref: http://www.gwynnedyer.com/articles/Gwynne%20Dyer%20article_%20%20Smeed's%20Law.txt

Re:Bad Title

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes but he has a lower user number =p

Re:Bad Title

[geekoid]

"which they should have done from the beginning rather than trying to roll their own solution."

I disagree.
Internal solution ahve a lot og benefits to them They last longer, more customization, ease of maintenance, etc.
The previous systems lasted for 35 years.

The problem is it wasn't managed by anyone with experience in managing large scale projects.

Re:Bad Title

[juan2074]

The only people who recommend PeopleSoft are the ones who have never used it.

Re:Bad Title

[ckaminski]

I would be surprised if even your quarter-million employee company has the payroll complexity, in particular, of a university system.
Just getting the requirements together enough for ADP can be a long, expensive affair.
</quote>

I don't buy it. With profit sharing models, commissions, tiered commission models, bonuses, etc, I don't think the real world is vastly less complex than that of a university system.

Re:Bad Title

[Fnkmaster]

My favorite part of living in New York City is getting to have all those first-generation drivers immigrate here and practice their skills as our city's taxi drivers.

My favorite story, from a good friend of mine (i.e. not a BS friend-of-a-friend tale), was a cab ride he had from a fellow who apparently didn't understand that the gas pedal is an input mechanism that can be tuned to the amount of acceleration desired - he thought it was either "on" or "off".

Hilarity ensued going down the West Side Highway as they'd accelerate up to 60, then brake sharply for the next red light. Rinse wash and repeat a dozen times over (if you've been on the West Side Highway, you'll understand).

Anyway, point is there is definitely truth to this - people who grow up around cars seem to have a better intuitive sense of how they are supposed to work and behave, and thus tend to be better drivers.

Re:Bad Title

[multimed]

Just blame it on some reporter, huh? It was an embarrassment because tens of millions of tax dollars were spent with absolutely nothing productive to show for it. Bringing this sort of waste to light is exactly what real journalists should be doing. This ain't hounding some C-list celebrity every hour of the day, this is bringing to light horrible management. It's too much to ask for accountability - for those responsible to booted - because not enough people/voters actually care. But at least those of use who do, have been infromed.

Re:Bad Title

[fishbowl]

>Now that we have a generation of IT professionals that were born and grew up in a world with computers, I have plenty of optimism that enterprise
>bloatware like PeopleSoft (Microsoft *, Novell, FootPrints, Cadence, etc) will slowly but surely be replaced by modular programs that actually do a task,
>and do it well.

The problems associated with a university payroll system, in particular, are less related to computer software and more to the incredibly complex set of business rules and legal obligations and contractual commitments that drive the requirements.

No matter how much experience you have with business software, the complexity doesn't go away. The $40 million in the story is more like $12 million in reality, and if you consider a staff of 30 professionals on a four-year project, would you be willing to do this kind of work for less money? That's an average $100K per year per employee to cover *all* overhead, not just their individual pay. This project isn't as ridiculously expensive as the article makes it out to be.

Oh, ffs

[ledow]

I'm sorry, but what a heap of crap.

It's a payroll system. Yeah, it's a biggee, and yeah, it's got a lot of old information in it most probably. It's written in an old language (Oh no! The end of the world! Soon we might not be able to understand our systems! Hold on... we just had three attempts and replacing it with something new and FAILED because we didn't know half the stuff it was running). But you're not telling me that MILLIONS of dollars and YEARS of work by supposedly professional IT companies isn't enough to get ANYTHING working well enough to say "We don't need to worry about that part any more". You can get an OS written for that sort of money, or kit out an entire borough of schools with an integrated network.

What's *more* disgusting is that by the looks of it, the IT people at the University are probably barely getting a look in - it's being project-managed by external companies. Come on, stop faffing about; seriously, this is just stupid. Get your *existing* IT team, hire a bunch of programmers directly (hey, you're a University... I wonder where you can get a crapload of cheap, intellectual labour nearby, trained in the art of programming properly and designing the systems from the start, supervised and educated by people who have spent years using their technical, professional and theoretical expertise in the subject?) and just write the damn thing from the ground up. It wouldn't cost anywhere near as much money/time as you have wasted on a single company out of those that tried to sell you crap. Oh, and you can make it do what YOU want any time and you'll have the programmer's hanging around for the next few years with an incentive to keep the system running properly ("What grade did I give you for that paper on your design of the new payroll system? I've revised it, it just crashed.").

If it's THAT damn big, you want to start breaking the thing up into pieces, anyway. Anything that you can't find out all that it does in that many YEARS, you really want to be breaking into smaller and smaller parts and replicating them one at a time. Don't pretend that you're the only place on Earth that has that amount of employees, that amount of computer data, and require mordernisation.

Get rid of the project managing companies, get rid of the "slice-off-50%-for-myself" companies, get rid of the stupid contracts that REWARD failure, and give the project to people who will give you a system that will not only last for ever but be documented and updated and revised and bug-fixed and converted for ever and a day.

Re:Oh, ffs

[Anonymous Coward]

There are numerous controls and nuances (with-holdings, taxes at the national/state/local levels, 401k, etc) needed for a payroll system to work properly. I guess the real question here is, why did they attempt to develop one in house as opposed to going external. For that kind of money, I'm sure they could have just gotten ADP to do their payroll for a few years, or even got a licensing agreement with Peoplesoft.

Re:Oh, ffs

[Anonymous Coward]

Being a graduate of Madcity, I can tell you that they produce some of the best programmers in the world.

"Guess what, ladies and gentlemen? This year's Comp Sci project is writing a payroll system..."

They could teach a 4 year Comp Sci program around it. Planning, implementation, support, and future growth.

Screw paying for it - utilize your existing resources!!!

Then again, with our current dumbf*ck Govenor... At least he's not going to make license plates like Illinois past governors...

Re:Oh, ffs

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree completely - Does a payroll system honestly cost 28 million dollars? NO! I've been in the software business for a while now and even enterprise level software doesn't cost this much to maintain or code for that matter! And what's the problem with legacy systems anyway? IBM seems to be doing just fine, and they are riddled with outdated systems.

Your right - these people are supposed to be working for an institution of higher education....really people. Come on.

Re:Oh, ffs

[aztektum]

srlsy! Also, it was made in the 70's! How complex can a program on a handful of punch cards be?!

Re:Oh, ffs

[j-turkey]

Without really understanding the details of their payroll system and the task involved, I don't necessarily agree with your assessment. Most university IT groups don't have stellar project managers, which is the one thing that a project of this scale (and criticality) needs. Further, it's likely that nobody has have the expertise in either the outgoing payroll system or the one that's going to replace it (either in a shrinkwrap or roll-your-own configuration). I'm not sure whether or not hiring a high-paid, highly experienced and qualified project manager as an FTE is warranted. Further, what does an IT department do with a really good PM with tons of experience and a huge list of successful projects when this project ends in 18-24 months? The smart money is to eliminate the position, which is what a smart manager will see when they interview the university. Instead, they would likely work on a contract basis and (as you say) slice off 50% for themselves.

Rolling their own payroll system is also a possible disaster for them. It's very likely that they're having a hard time communicating requirements to professional payroll implementation/transition consultants who do this sort of thing all the time with a shrinkwrap ERP (like Oracle, SAP, etc). What makes you think that the university will be able to better communicate requirements to developers?

I guess that this is all armchair quarterbacking from both of us, since I have no idea of the circumstances beyond the details that the article provides (which are light, at best). It appears that this was mishandled on multiple levels though - likely both the fault of the university management and the consultants. Usually for projects to fail on this level, it has to go both ways - consultants mismanage a project, the university mismanages the consultants, and probably isn't able to clearly communicate requirements.

Re:Oh, ffs

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh My Good God.

You're not seriously suggesting that the university write it themselves. The university guys sit in an ivory tower and study algorithms and when it comes down to it, couldn't project manage their way out of a wet paper bag.

Dont get me wrong, the lecturers are brilliant brilliant people, but in my experience (we're writing software for the local university at the moment) the lecturers are exactly that -- lecturers, then you infer putting the *students* in to do the grunt work?! I know from experience that it takes 1-2 years for a good software junior just to come up to speed AFTER COMPLETING a degree, because they need time to make all those silly mistakes that their senior co-workers can help them learn and grow from, these silly mistakes have a $ cost, but that's part of hiring people and growing programmers, but from the sounds of TFA, this particular project cant soak up many silly mistake problems from 2nd year students, chosen for cheap gruntwork.

Yes you need *good* programmers to make *good* software. But then you need good project managers to steer the ship to the destination, and you will not find that in-house.

Re:Oh, ffs

[Anonymous Coward]

Your opinion implies you think know what you are talking about, but you do not. Fucking stupid slashdot assholes have worthless opinions about anything.

Re:Oh, ffs

[FooRat]

the IT people at the University are probably barely getting a look in - it's being project-managed by external companies. Come on, stop faffing about; seriously, this is just stupid.

Never attribute to incompetence what can be explained by corruption. This is not "stupid", it's corruption working exactly as it's intended to. What's perhaps stupid is those ultimately footing the bill being too naive to realise it, and not holding the corrupt to account.

Re:Oh, ffs

[dbcad7]

There are companies.. such as PayChex, with multiple branches in many cities.. and there are other companies just like them .. and they all handle multiple businesses at each branch that have all different types of pay and tax schemes,, and I guarantee not one of these places uses software that cost even as much as a half a million, let alone 40 million .. in fact, why not just use one of these companies ?

Re:Oh, ffs

[RiotingPacifist]

why not just run a course on the old language then employ one of your graduates to maintain it?

Re:Oh, ffs

[FudRucker]

i dont think they want it fixed, they want a broken system that they can milk for all its worth.

Re:Oh, ffs

[cptdondo]

Yeah, I'm involved in a small gov't - and the cruft that accretes over time is incredible. We have nearly as many employee classifications as employees. (that means nearly every employee has his/her own job description and responsibilities and pay scale.)

We have union contracts. Several different ones, with different benefits. We have different health care benefits, retirement benefits, and so on. In some cases, we have a single employee who has a particular health plan and retirement plan, and they're grandfathered in, so we can't change them.

It's not just a matter of paying all the different taxes; it's that you have to understand all of the classifications, grandfather clauses, pay scales, benefits, and so on. I would guess that for UM, you multiply this by 10 or 20 and you see what you're dealing with.

The *only* way this can be done is to reclassify all your employees into some sort of structure that makes sense; this will invariably be shot down by the union as some members will see an erosion of benefits.

So most organizations will outsource this, blame it all on the consultant, take it to council/board of trustees/etc, and then run like hell from the fallout.

Re:Oh, ffs

[magarity]

What's *more* disgusting is that by the looks of it, the IT people at the University are probably barely getting a look in - it's being project-managed by external companies. Come on, stop faffing about; seriously, this is just stupid. Get your *existing* IT team, hire a bunch of programmers
 
If you'd RTFA, you'd see that *40* staff from the IT department are in on the project. But that's actually a problem - the existing people typically approach a replacement as a set of tweaks to what is already there just as a matter of human nature. Furthermore, the people who are working there now are in place because they've been taught/trained/experienced in *maintaining* the current systems, NOT because they are taught/trained/experienced in developing new systems.
 
They need outside people who know what they're doing and have the executive sponsorship to do what needs to be done. TFA specifically faults poor project management and planning and that's definitely what causes project like this to fail, NOT because the in house staff have not been used to do the work.

Re:Oh, ffs

[stephanruby]

What's *more* disgusting is that by the looks of it,

It's disgusting. I agree, but not for the reasons you mention. Usually, it's just because the people at the top of a University have no clue about technical matters. To get to be a Regent for instance, you need good political skills, or you need to be rich, or you need to be part of a well-known, rich, and powerful family. Sadly, many crucial technical decisions that involve a ton of money get made around a large conference table, or they get made on someone else's expense account, or they get made by an alpha male who was a great footballer during his College years -- so he thinks he's qualified to do anything.

Get your *existing* IT team,

When your most capable existing IT staff already works 50 hours a week, and is already exempt from receiving over time. Why would they want to participate in such a project and give up an additional 30 hours of time for basically zero money and a ton of heart-aches? What's the upside? No, man. A competent IT staff knows when to say "no".

And even if such an IT staffer was interested in doing such a project in the first place. He might just be better served in starting his own open source project. At least with an open source project, you would have more freedom and flexibility, and if you're any good, you can pick your own customers/users, and assuming you were careful -- you can take the project with you if you leave to another employer.

Same thing with Professors. Don't you think they have better things to do? like research, publishing, or teaching? Even Richard Feynman, he said the only reason he got anything done, was because he was adamant about refusing the drivel committee work that his schools were always trying to pawn off onto him.

hire a bunch of programmers directly (hey, you're a University... I wonder where you can get a crapload of cheap, intellectual labour nearby,

Yeah, if you think that throwing more bodies at a problem is a solution, or that changing bodies every six months following the school year is a good idea, then may be you should read "The Mythical-Man Month" by Frederick Brooks and "Peopleware" by DeMarco.

trained in the art of programming properly

Ah, I see. You must have gone to a school where they actually taught you programming. Good for you. I know those schools exist, I've just never been to one. So you'll have to forgive my ignorance. In my school, they taught me "how to think", and they taught me the "Science" of Computers. Believe me, I was as shocked by this news as anyone else. The programming, I had to learn it on my own, preferably before or at least during the first week of class. Now don't get me wrong, when I got out of there, my ego was huge and the knowledge I gained was tremendous, but I was still an idiot by then and I still have the nagging suspicion that I might still be an idiot now -- ten years later (I'm just less of an idiot hopefully).

Now, this is not to say that I approve the way projects are done in a major University system like this. It's just that I hope you begin to understand that Universities have some deep institutional problems that can not be solved by low level people. And that the people at the top, they don't really care, their pocketbooks and/or their egos are well fed by the existing system as it is, so they don't see any major need for a change.

Re:Oh, ffs

[j-turkey]

Your experience seems like par for the course. My organization is in the middle of replacing their HRIS/Payroll system (not with a true ERP, but there were other reasons for that). It's a bear of a project. I'm confident that we'll get it done, but it's unlikely to launch on time. I'd rather be late than have my pay screwed up though.

Re:Oh, ffs

[Antique Geekmeister]

I've been that random employee, several times. It's difficult and painful, and it's often career death to be the one person who can maintain the old system: it interfers with being allowed to work on forward looking projects, and can make you layoff fodder.

Much of such expenses are due to "savings" by refusing to update earlier. Like replacing your teeth with dentures instead of brushing nightly, the refusal to do software or system updates can be far more expensive and disabling than a campaign of small, regular updates. We're about to see a big set of Windows based companies run headlong into this as they jump from Windows XP (which should have been called NT 5) to Windows 7 (which they at least numbered correctly). You can sometimes wisely skip an entire OS, but for a 30 year old code base, I expect some serious record keeping and structural problems.

Re:Oh, ffs

[trawg]

One thing that I'm interested in is, if the U of Wisconsin has a big IT course or business management - is this bad press for it?

If I was choosing unis, and heard about a massive spectacular project failure at that university - why would I want to go there and have them teach me about similar things?

(Seems likely that the departments that cause these problems are highly different to the ones doing the teaching, but it seems like an interesting thought experiment :)

Re:Oh, ffs

[DarkOx]

The other thing one needs to consider is if you say "payroll system" and "1975" than it is almost certain to be anything and everything but a payroll system.

As you point out Payroll is much more complex then most people figure at first blush. Its also worth considering that in the 1960's and 1970's vendors like IBM and Control Data, were still figuring out how to market computers to the private sector. The killer app was payroll. At the time you got the COBOL or ADA source as well. Databases were typically formated files.

Since people had the source "develops" were expensive and hard to find. They would just build on what they had. The next thing you know the "payroll" system is the contact relations manager, its the general accounting package, its the general HR management package, and it plans the breakfast menu.

Sure all the stuff gets parted back out over time but then you have all the new apps reaching into the old system's database and still using it, so its other functions continue to work; and lord only knows what calling into it for this reason and that. Lots of it is probably not documented, some of it is an Access application on some secretary in building fours desk.

You don't learn about these things often until you break them. Honestly for a project like this you might very well need to interview everyone who has an administrative position on campus; to truly get it right.

Still so far even with all that in mind this sounds like its outrageously expensive; and its been done other places so it is possible. I have been a party to parts of it at and F50 (with stuff going back to only the mid 80s) and its bear but you can do it.

Re:Oh, ffs

[brusk]

Typically, it's not the same people running the administration as teaching the courses and conducting the research. The faculty may advise (basically, serve on a committee), but other administrators will be doing all the back-of-the-house stuff. So incompetent administration might be a reason not to go there, but it is not diagnostic of the quality of the CS faculty.

Re:Oh, ffs

[laejoh]

Drop a deck and you'll find out :)

Re:Oh, ffs

[atamido]

Most university IT groups don't have stellar project managers, which is the one thing that a project of this scale (and criticality) needs.

This. Most universities pay their IT departments crap because they can get them so cheaply filled by students. Most students don't have a full academic education, and almost none have real world experience. The ones that do have the education and experience get higher paying jobs at private organizations. Having a university IT department manage a project of this magnitude is asking for trouble.

Re:Oh, ffs

[rs79]

"Also, it was made in the 70's! How complex can a program on a handful of punch cards be?! "

Back off monkey boy. By 1975 we had DECtape.

And RK05's.

Re:Oh, ffs

[fishbowl]

A university's payroll system is more complex than some governments, and if they show up at ADP's door, ADP sees giant dollar signs.

Re:Oh, ffs

[fishbowl]

>I've been in the software business for a while now and even enterprise level software doesn't cost this much

Tell us a little bit about what you know about a state university's HR and Payroll.

Describe a few of the simpler relationships that can exist between the state, a faculty member, a member of a professional staff, a contractor, an undergrad and a grad student.

Talk a bit about benefits management for faculty that work at other institutions for part of the year.

Discuss considerations of foreign employees, and domestic employees abroad, in an academic context.

I guess this will start to scratch the surface.

Re:Oh, ffs

[Anonymous Coward]

Heh you need to find the unofficial Historians for stuff like: how things are supposed to work. Why is this thing like that? Is it a bug or is it feature?

Re:Oh, ffs

[Anonymous Coward]

[...] you're not telling me that MILLIONS of dollars and YEARS of work by supposedly professional IT companies isn't enough to get ANYTHING working well enough to say "We don't need to worry about that part any more".

Any project over 6 months runs an exponential risk of failure. There is also a critical limit based on budget. So basically, millions of dollars and years of work virtually GUARANTEE a failure. What they could have done was:

• reorganize the departments for a simpler payroll process
• remove the superfluous complexity from the old system
• replace parts of the system with new systems that provide complete but well-delimited services
• replace the services with improved versions at will, preferably in a more modern environment that supports a service oriented architecture and enterprise service bus.

Or if you want an off-the-shelf solution:

• reorganize the departments for a simpler payroll process, preferably you use the standard process in a vendor-supplied standard payrolling system like Peoplesoft
• implement the standard software with standard process

In both cases the correct step would be to start with the organization first. If you have thousands of exceptions to arcane rules so much that you need humans to understand it, you will need a fully sentient AI to implement this system. That's a so-called 'Hard' IT-problem. If you reorganize first to be able to do 80% of all tasks just by following a set of rules, you can automate that part and have humans deal with the other 20%. A good workflow solution capable of integrating human actions would also help a lot with that. However, it seems they missed the first step and ended up in standard failmode.

Re:Oh, ffs

[Anonymous Coward]

Students at Uni are not properly trained. I've spent much of my carreer training them. Passing a test on polymorphic design or databases is not the same as actually understanding it.

I would never go on a project which has only grads in it.

Training is part of the job, no matter where I go. Ipso facto...

Re:Oh, ffs

[Chaos Incarnate]

XP would actually be NT 5.1. Windows 7, being about as much of an improvement on Vista as XP was on 2000, would properly be labeled NT 6.1.

Re:Oh, ffs

[Anonymous Coward]

What garbage, every other University or College in the state would have the same payroll requirements. This should not be treated like it is a one-off system to send a manned mission to Mars.

Re:Oh, ffs

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you nailed the real problems here.... incompetency in the finance and projects departments at the university. Oh, and hiring incompetent people to do the work didn't help either.

Re:Oh, ffs

[Anonymous Coward]

As someone who works in a large university IT department this is the stupidest thing I've ever heard. You most certainly do NOT want your existing IT staff handling this all on their own. Do you want them involved? Absolutely. Should they doing all of this, with student labor? Hell no. The IT staff is already in place doing the business of running IT day to day and trying to meet organizational planning needs for the future. This type of massive long term project, where you're ripping out an established system that's heavily integrated into the organizational infrastructure and replacing it, requires outside help. Placing the burden of replacing that system on the same people maintaining that system is a really, really bad idea. You will need to hire a bunch of help or contract out large portions of the project to avoid overburdening your existing IT staff.

And don't get me started on how bad of an idea it is to use student labor to do the work. Students, generally speaking, have no practical experience in implementing large scale projects, may or may not know the language/environment, have probably never written documentation/code specs/comments, probably have never done QA or testing, and will only be around a few years to help maintain the system. You'd have to train these guys as you're expecting them to produce good, reusable code in a language they've probably never used. Not to mention the outside time burden a student has with classes, homework, drunken parties, etc. Even grad students would be bad for this as they may or may not have real world exp not to mention their own time burdens outside work. Don't get me wrong, throwing a small project to a student every now and then is a great idea for both the uni and the student but trying to use student labor to replace a mission critical system is really stupid.

Prospectus

[xdor]

Phase 1

Extraction of business rules from legacy (probably COBAL) system.
Farm it out to other universities or India.
(Cost: maybe $1 million) Basic requirements and documentation finalized

Phase 2

Take the rules and implement the entire system into a PostgreSQL database Java middle-tier to Java AND web-based interface. Revise documentation.
(Cost: another million)

Phase 3

User acceptance and testing. and go live.
(Cost: 1-2 million)

Profit Finally, hold the remaining funds as a "maintenance fee" and use the interest to cover ongoing support

Re:Prospectus

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, that's a totally convincing business case right there. Where do I sign?

(or should I go with the people that can actually spell COBOL correctly?)

Re:Prospectus

[wilder_card]

If it is a typical complex, highly-customized business system, it will have:

1. years and years of poorly- or un-documented code patches, fixes, etc.
2. lots of legacy code which is no longer used but never removed
3. Dozens of external systems which extract information from it, probably each in a different way
4. large amounts of critical information not written down but scattered among different user groups

So, I'd say your Phase 1 above is a vast under-estimation. And the idea that you can farm it out to an external organization, especially one without close personal contact with users, is pure fantasy.

At the end of your process you'll have a system that does maybe 20% of what the users actually need, and 50% of which is stuff no one needs any longer.

Re:Prospectus

[kingkoopa]

Phase 1

Extraction of business rules from legacy (probably COBAL) system.

COBAL, exactly what I was thinking. It reminds me of an article that was on ./ about a year ago talking about how California couldn't find anyone to maintain/upgrade their payroll system becuase they couldn't find any COBAL programmers.

Re:Prospectus

[Alethes]

I'd simply mod you up if I could, but I can't so, I'll comment instead.

Speaking from extensive experience in data integration and migration from legacy (no, I really mean ancient) systems, this really is just a simplified version of what really happens in successful projects of this scope. Having also seen the nightmare scenario that UW is going through, I can guarantee that the failure lies in a lack of project management. With a budget that large, it didn't even require good project management. All they needed to do is actually have documented specs. Something as simple as here's a list of everything our current system does that we need to keep, these are the additional features we want to add, and here's the process we have to use to ensure data integrity. A Post-It Note even?

Re:Prospectus

[RiotingPacifist]

Their a university, they could just start teaching cobal again!

Re:Prospectus

[ctmurray]

This whole thread is a deja-vu moment for my wife, a COBOL programmer. She went through being ripped off by Arthur Anderson (Accenture now) for the HR system at her company. They had to also go through more than one COTS + consultancy to finally end up on Peoplesoft. So these are her comments:

1. Find out what other Big Ten universities have implemented, pick the best and use that one.

2. Run away from Accenture. If they rip off everyone they work with, who do they use for references for the next job?

She is looking for a job, where are all the job postings for COBOL programmers? Seriously, there do not see to be any jobs. I think the consultants have feed the clients a line about there not being any programmers for the legacy system (to scare them into the new solutions). So everyone thinks these people don't exist, so no one posts for the jobs. She is only 50, plenty of years to work fixing these systems.

Re:Prospectus

[Darkness404]

And have 99% of CS students either not enroll or be mad that they have to take a course in what is effectively a dead language?

Re:Prospectus

[thousandinone]

Whooooosh.

Re:Prospectus

[wvmarle]

Phase 1

Extraction of business rules from legacy (probably COBAL) system. Farm it out to other universities or India. (Cost: maybe $1 million) Basic requirements and documentation finalized

This should not be filtered from the code - it probably can not be filtered from the code.

These requirements will have to be provided by the various institutions and workgroups and contractors and tax specialists. But getting those requirements is probably a dog in itself: many high-level employees will have personalised contracts with personalised payment scales and benefits, for each of them the rules will have to be filtered from the contract. This is not going to be easy. And it is going to be really hard to convince those workgroups to go through years-old contracts and updates for replacing a payroll that (presumably, and certainly from their pov), "just works". This is the really hard part. The next step is easy. Implementing rules is easy. A lot of work probably, but no more than that.

But making the system maintainable later - that is another matter. How are you going to implement rule changes? Tax rule changes? New contracts? The worst you can tell an applicant that "this salary related request you have we can not allow you because our payroll can't handle it". It is going to have to be mighty flexible. And with that mighty complex.

Shutup slave! Git back ta whorek payin' yer Texas!

[Anonymous Coward]

You have no interest in the matter that grants you any right to ask questions to a selection of qualified individuals that are fixing an antiquated system of accounting debits and credits. Just look the other direction, and continue paying for this over-haul. You don't own anything over here and we gave you permition to use our certifications and credibility for future employment. If you don't like it, hand in your card and leave quickly the way you came. Pay your taxes so we can avoid things like this happening in other corporations that happen to use the word "University" in their legal name. Shutup or you'll get the hose!

-Alex Jones

Payroll???

[BillandTed]

Can anyone say ADP? Outsource this and pocket 2 mil for new hardware - they'll call you a god and you can then update seriously outdated hardware needed to run such outdated software... Just a thought

Re:Payroll???

[wonderboss]

You beat me to it. It is payroll. Fire all the payroll staff at the university campuses. Switch to ADP. The University has special requirements? Horsepucky. The only special requirement they have is to spend $30.4M. I'm sure the combined salary and benefits of the payroll staff and IT people responsible would more than cover the cost of ADP.

Bubbles!

[really_irish_man]

FTA: Giroux said earlier planning budget estimates and timelines had to be changed because "we did not have the full picture of how complex this project would be." He noted a state audit in 2007 of troubled information technology projects identified inadequate planning as the source of most problems.

Seems like a classic case of the bubbles don't turn into code.

Re:Bubbles!

[n4djs]

You aren't just kidding - I wrote a reporting system for a nuclear plant weld monitoring system. and 2 bubbles turned into 5500 lines of FORTRAN after all the hidden contractual commitments became known....

Re:What is so special about this university?

[emmons]

This is a statewide system that needs to be deployed on all 26 UW campuses, administration and UW-Extension (which has an office in each of Wisconsin's 72 counties). It handles all types of employees from student LTEs to professors to staff to administration, all of their benefits through the state retirement fund and the state employees healthcare plan (which itself is fairly complex). It has to deal with union and non-union employees and their different pay structures, special deals for certain faculty, etc. It's a complex system that is specific to the State of Wisconsin, so no, there is no off the shelf solution.

On top of all that, much of the cost is in deployment and training of all the people who have to use the thing.

This is a B-league project, A-leaguers avoid it

[cryfreedomlove]

The real problem here is that best of breed software developers have too many great opportunities that are more inline with their passions to work on this backwater payroll system. This leaves the unmotivated drones managed by Dilbertesque managers to run with this ball.

Re:This is a B-league project, A-leaguers avoid it

[Anonymous Coward]

best of breed

Did you really just use that BS buzz-phrase in an unironic manner? Sigh.

OK?

[arizwebfoot]

So you get a few linux boxes and put paymaster or any other Open Source on it.

Done.

Cost: 50,000 with labor...

Re:OK?

[Anonymous Coward]

yeah, then they'd be paying big bucks when support is dropped for that shitware.

go commercial and others will conform to whatever standards are popular. that's the bottom line. open source assfags act like it doesn't happen but it does happen like that.

Re:OK?

[ndege]

wish there was a tag that was, "LOL -1"

Outsourcing it

[canuck57]

Now according to Wiki they employ 2,054 faculty members and probably outsource most other services like cleaning etc. That works out to $14,000 per year per faculty.

Any chance of outsourcing that?

Re:Outsourcing it

[BBTaeKwonDo]

I agree with your point of outsourcing, but your facts are wrong. FTFA: "The university has long wanted to replace the aging computer system that pays its 60,000 employees". It's the whole university system, not just the campus at Madison.

Re:Outsourcing it

[TJCacher]

$40,000,000 / 60,000 = $666.6666666.... No wonder they're having problems....

Re:What is so special about this university?

[Anonymous Coward]

And that's why organizations should avoid such complexities like the plague. States shouldn't be re-inventing any of that stuff, nor should their universities.

Managers often have profound ignorance.

[Futurepower(R)]

We see a lot of stories about this kind of thing on Slashdot. Often it is a politician showing that he or she is completely ignorant of technical issues, but wants his or her foolish opinions to be respected.

Maybe it wouldn't be sensible to attend a university that has such technically backward management.

The world will be a better place when all the managers retire who were raised without computers.

Re:Managers often have profound ignorance.

[interkin3tic]

The world will be a better place when all the managers retire who were raised without computers.

But will get much much worse a short time later when managers who were raised on twitter take effect.

Re:Managers often have profound ignorance.

[WillKemp]

The world will be a better place when all the managers retire who were raised without computers.

I wish that was true, but just because they know what a mouse does and how to shut down Windows doesn't mean they've got a clue about ICT management. You don't have to be good with computers to manage an ICT project properly - but you do have to be a good manager. Part of the problem is that even if they start out with a brain, they go to business school and learn how to not use it.

Re:Managers often have profound ignorance.

[eth1]

Or university management funnelling money to their consultant friends...

Re:Managers often have profound ignorance.

[jellie]

I laughed when I read that the first $28.4 million was spent on Lawson. My mom is in charge of payroll for a medium-sized company, and the employees are mostly doctors (who are probably the most difficult group to deal with, second only to lawyers). She complains daily about Lawson system that they have been rolling out.

The IT department of her company is utterly incompetent, and the business analysts and consultants that Lawson sends are just as bad. Lawson is custom-developing the ERP for her company, but no one bothered to work with the users to understand the requirements. Management is bad, but getting rid of poorly-trained consultants would also make the world better.

Re:Managers often have profound ignorance.

[SSJ_Ramon]

We'll get our performance reviews in 140 characters or less.

No problem. Just find some smart badgers.

[Futurepower(R)]

"I'll bugfix this thing with badgers gnawing on both my arms for that kind of pay."

That's nothing! I'll get the badgers to do the coding.

Re:No problem. Just find some smart badgers.

[j-turkey]

"I'll bugfix this thing with badgers gnawing on both my arms for that kind of pay." That's nothing! I'll get the badgers to do the coding.

Sure - but what will you do with all of those MUSHROOMS, MUSHROOMS -- and SNAAAKE?

Re:No problem. Just find some smart badgers.

[minvaren]

Send them to Kenya, of course.

Re:No problem. Just find some smart badgers.

[Ryan Monster]

Get badgers coding on a linux terminal installed on a dead badger.. that would be a neat trick!

Re:No problem. Just find some smart badgers.

[Bigjeff5]

But Kenya's got lions!!

And tigers too.

Re:No problem. Just find some smart badgers.

[Anonymous Coward]

Badgers! We don't need no stinking badgers!

Re:No problem. Just find some smart badgers.

[Anonymous Coward]

Nah... leave the coding to the code monkeys... let the badgers make coffee and maintain the main-lined caffeine drip to all of those happy programmers :-/

Seriously - can you think of a more boring system to code up than a payroll system? The reason this stuff takes so long is that it is just painfully dull to code it up - that's my take on it at least.

Re:No problem. Just find some smart badgers.

[Anonymous Coward]

That's nothing! I'll get the badgers to do the coding.

Badgers? We don't need no stinking badgers!

Corruption

[FooRat]

Sorry, but I have a pretty good idea what corruption looks like, and this stinks to high hell of corruption, the odds are about zero that it's anything else. Computers and how 'complex' they are great premises for corrupt bureaucrats to launch 'projects' that become huge money holes.

Re:Corruption

[GodfatherofSoul]

And, why is the blame being assigned to the bureaucrats? What about the original bidder who ripped them off? Software is technical and the Dot Com era should have been evidence enough of how a slick talking shyster in an Armani suit can sell vaporware to the uninitiated.

Re:Corruption

[Anonymous Coward]

Agreed, the top players pocketed most of the $40K^2 and now want more.

Re:Corruption

[Anonymous Coward]

Really? You would presume malice when incompetence would sufficiently explain this?

There's this thing called Occam's Razor.

Re:Corruption

[Hognoxious]

Two words: Bernie Madoff.

Re:Corruption

[geekoid]

Is suspect you only know what people tell you corruption smells like. How many corruption cases have you investigated and tried? what's that? NONE? STFU

This isn't a lot of money for a state wide system.

This is the most expense that I ever have heard...

[kvillaca]

Why they don't start to getting the specifications now, and in few years they should have one brand new system, running in new machines, and probably faster than the last one. In this case is the better choice, instead of try understand the old system and try make some sort of patches that is with this price some sort of crazy thing.

The money goes quickly on these projects

[kbob88]

I've been involved in a few of these types of projects (unfortunately), and believe it or not, the money goes quickly. So does the time. It's not just coding -- that's actually a very small part of the money. It would take some time to burn through $40mm, but you'd be amazed how quickly these project eat up cash. I certainly was when I first got involved.

Here are some things to consider:

• They always consider the costs of the internal people's time on these projects, even if they're not dedicated to the project. So if you have a 4 hour requirements meeting with 6 business folks from Payroll, well, that gets figured into the overall budget at 4 * 6 * hourly loaded cost of employees, plus your time.
• Software and database licenses add up quickly for this type of project. You know they're not running on MySQL, right? It's probably Oracle all the way, and that's $$$. Some vendors charge by the seat -- how many users do you think a payroll system for 60,000 employees has? That's right, a lot. Plus hardware costs -- they're not running this on their old hardware.
• A project of this size probably has a project manager, several project administrators, an internal business lead, and an internal technical lead, at a minimum, running the show.
• How much do you think gathering requirements, mapping out existing processes, mapping requirements to functionality, developing specs to cover the gaps, creating the new processes,
  testing the new processes, and getting buy-in and approval on all that from all the stakeholders costs? You know there will always be 3 to 5 revision and feedback cycles for everything. That's an easy 6 to 18 months of work for a team of six to eight people probably.
• They're going to have run it in test mode for several pay periods, while the old system is still running, and check the results. That will result in duplicate work for all the people entering in the data.
• Converting the existing data costs money.
• Training costs for the users -- there are probably several hundred users, at different sites. (Plus there's always "Change Management" costs)

(Ugh, thank God I'm out of that ERP systems business these days!)

Yes, a fair amount of the money is probably wasted. But these projects do cost big bucks. This isn't hacking up a new blogging tool from open source toolkits. I'm not saying it's right, or well managed (it almost certainly isn't), but to say "dude, I could hack up a payroll system in a couple of months, pay me the money!" just shows that while you may know how to sling code, you don't have a clue about delivering solutions to business problems.

Re:The money goes quickly on these projects

[Jodka]

Ya. All that. Or they could have purchased an off-the-shelf system and adapted to that by conforming to modern business and accounting practices. And purchased custom data migration from India through a U.S. contractor cheaply.

 

Re:The money goes quickly on these projects

[Anonymous Coward]

It would take some time to burn through $40mm

The first time around, the university spent $28.4 million over three years. If you pay the system architects/designers/coders/testers/trainers $100,000 per year each as a salary, that is a team of 94 people working three years, with nothing to show for it at the end.

This time around, the university is going to spend $12 million for the design alone. Implementation will be on top of that. For an accounting system.

Re:The money goes quickly on these projects

[rhizome]

Here are some things to consider:

Sounds to me like a large chunk is consumed by "too many chiefs."

Re:The money goes quickly on these projects

[barzok]

You're forgetting software licensing, and hardware to run it on. I'd bet it's a large portion of that $28 million.

Re:The money goes quickly on these projects

[barzok]

Or they could have purchased an off-the-shelf system and adapted to that by conforming to modern business and accounting practices.

Nice thought, but almost no one takes an off-the-shelf system and uses it as-is; once the non-IT people get involved, they want to tweak this and that and the other thing because they don't want to let go of all of their business practices they've developed over the years.

Not saying it's right - quite the opposite. I'm involved with a system at work where we've customized the hell out of it "because we could" and now the fact that those customizations exist is biting us in the ass.

Re:The money goes quickly on these projects

[Anonymous Coward]

If they already burned $28M, and promise it will be finished for another $12M ($40M total), I guarantee with final working system will end up costing $55-60M. Having seen a few projects like this it is extremely unlikely they deliver it $40M.

Re:The money goes quickly on these projects

[atamido]

Some vendors charge by the seat -- how many users do you think a payroll system for 60,000 employees has? That's right, a lot.

This is something I've never understood. In my limited experience, good software never has the client access the database directly. It will request information from a server, which queries the database, and returns the necessary data to the client. This vastly simplifies many aspects of security and reduces the "client access licenses" to just the ones used by the server.

Am I missing something here?

Re:The money goes quickly on these projects

[Hognoxious]

You are. The thing that does all that "request information from a server, which queries the database, and returns the necessary data to the client" malarkey is called an application. Those are often charged on a per seat basis too.

Re:The money goes quickly on these projects

[Rich0]

Hardware is just a drop in the bucket for something like this. If the project needed 100 servers it couldn't cost more than $1-2m - I doubt Wikipedia has 100 servers. Now, it isn't uncommon to see servers quoted at enormous budgets in internal accounting, but that usually isn't the cost of the hardware but another way of passing on the cost of more people to set it up, maintain it, manage the people who do those things, and the boss's cousin who sits around and plays solitaire all day.

I've seen ERP implementations and it just isn't a pretty sight. I really don't get why they need to be THAT expensive. I have worked on moderately large applications and I have no illusions that something like this can be done for $20k or anything like that, but when tens of millions of dollars are changing hands there is a LOT of money going into overhead of some kind.

Re:Can't spell in business case

[xdor]

Nice catch.

But you'll notice I am readily farming that out.

Feature accretion

[macraig]

"Re-engineering a 30 year old system that's been accreting features for 30 years, though, isn't an easy task."

I love it when you talk dirty like that! Gimme some more, and say it in a hoarse whisper!

Re:Feature accretion

[Anonymous Coward]

At least they are not excreting features

Re:Feature accretion

[macraig]

Maybe they are... do we actually have bathroom video to prove otherwise?

Re:Feature accretion

[Tokerat]

"Re-engineering a 30 year old system that's been accreting features for 30 years, though, isn't an easy task."

I love it when you talk dirty like that! Gimme some more, and say it in a hoarse whisper!

*neigh*

Re:Feature accretion

[jollyreaper]

"Re-engineering a 30 year old system that's been accreting features for 30 years, though, isn't an easy task."

I love it when you talk dirty like that! Gimme some more, and say it in a hoarse whisper!

I never got why people liked the Hoarse Whisperer. So creepy, it's almost German.

Re:Feature accretion

[macraig]

Nay, neigh!

Re:Feature accretion

[macraig]

Nein!

Paymaster open source payroll software

[Futurepower(R)]

This Paymaster?

Should we change the name?

[pig-power]

Maybe...
just maybe...
we can call it "The Looney-versity of Wisconsin".
Would be appropriate.

Re:Should we change the name?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, it's appropriate that a lame no-content article is met with lame no-humor jabs.

Honestly, what's the point? If we had a separate article every time a big project didn't work out, we wouldn't have any space left for the obligatory anti-RIAA rant fest. Or are we s

Re:This is the most expense that I ever have heard

[Anonymous Coward]

Because the old system IS the specification.

Re:Distillation

[xdor]

Based on what you're saying I'm stepping in it just like all the contractors and companies in the last 30 years.

That's really enlightening, actually.

So taking the time to interview the business to obtain an understanding of what they actually need would be more valuable than attempting to divine that from the binary tea leaves

I suppose this kind of due diligence is taught in most colleges, just not at the University of Wisconsin?

Here's the real story

[Anonymous Coward]

There's nothing wrong with the current payroll system other than it's old and runs on old hardware. The guys who wrote it 30+ years ago did a pretty good job.

The problem is, those guys are long retired, and some are dead. The ones who are still living have some hard feelings. They got treated like crap and were told to give up their jobs to youngsters whose sole knowledge of COBOL was a CS professor saying how awful it was. Consequently, there hasn't been much in the way of maintenance or knowledge transfer; the young'uns simply weren't interested.

They brought an old guy in to deal with Y2K issues. They agreed to pay him well, but then got chintzy when it turned out that there really wasn't much that he needed to do. They eventually did pay him, but kicked him to the curb again afterwards.

Since none of the young'uns understand the system, and the old guy refuses to deal with them any more, they have no choice but to replace it entirely. The problem is, nobody really knows what went into the system except for the old guy, who has the irritating habit of wanting to be paid to have his knowledge tapped.

COBOL is not that horrible, except in the minds of the ignorant. If you could do BASIC or FORTRAN, you could do COBOL. The bulk of a COBOL program isn't code at all, but instead is structure and format definitions ("data division"). Don't expect to have recursion or local variables (those are all new-fangled extensions) or object-oriented semantics. Be grateful that the original self-modifying feature of COBOL got removed. Then just break it down. Each procedure is labeled, and unless the programmer was an idiot the variable names have some relationship to what they mean.

The only real PITA for COBOL is learning all the reserved words (there's a few hundred of them) and their semantics. Other than that, it's just drudgery.

Re:Here's the real story

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not sure that your providing the full story but from what I have heard regarding the project is that there were two problems:

1. Opposition and lack of adoption by employees.
2. Arrogance and irresponsible behavior (ie politial and monetary) on the part of many involved with the project.

The problem has been a matter of technology but people acting out of negligence and greed. It is hurting UW-Madison in more areas than this project.

UW needs to fix its retention problem, reign in it's spending on buildings no one wants, cut back on political appointees, and get back into the business of educating students.

Re:Here's the real story

[lawpoop]

They brought an old guy in to deal with Y2K issues. They agreed to pay him well, but then got chintzy when it turned out that there really wasn't much that he needed to do. They eventually did pay him, but kicked him to the curb again afterwards.

Hey, I'm really on the side of good living wages for workers and all, but what exactly were the employers supposed to do in this case? Give the guy a salary and retirement because he spent 160 hours hacking COBOL in December of 1999? He was charging a decent hourly rate, right?

This would be a situation where someone in retirement might be a consultant, and get paid hourly.

Re:Here's the real story

[Anonymous Coward]

Except I know the folks who maintain the current system. They are competent, not ready for retirement and they get the job done admirably. Meanwhile UW-Madison is raising tuition on Ugrads and extra 1K a year beyond normal tuition increases. But they have money to replace a system that works!

Re:Here's the real story

[Tablizer]

The only real PITA for COBOL is learning all the reserved words (there's a few hundred of them) and their semantics. Other than that, it's just drudgery.

The trickiest thing I found about COBOL was figuring out the nesting of old-style IF statements. One period can make a huge difference and there are too many indentation conventions. That and the fact that if number fields overflowed, they just truncated instead of halted. That was a dumb language decision.
         

Re:Here's the real story

[Anonymous Coward]

When you see something like that
ADD YEARS TO AGE

(translation : age = age + years )
May be prof.dr.Edsger W.Dijkstra was right :

"The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offense."
http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD04xx/EWD498.html

Re:Here's the real story

[Anonymous Coward]

They have not asked, nor wanted to know HOW to keep running - They have no idea.
1) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hercules_emulator
2) Cost of IBM Z/OS or 2nd Hand Mainframe or software is chump change - IBM cuts great deals with universities
3) 30 Year code runs UNMODIFIED - Frankly they lie if they say it does or will not not work
4) DB2 runs on Linux, and can have easy, interface to the old system that works
5) PC Software Licences are not cheap at all - Microsoft often cuts deals 'free' deals with universities, but Oracle and PeopleSoft do not. No savings.
6) Solution. Put out an SOS to newsgroup IBM_MAIN
7) Fire the person who dreamed this up and sustained it.

Re:Here's the real story

[imobilizer]

Actually, I believe the heart of the payroll system is written in Assembler, not COBOL.

If it's the system I think it is, the guy who wrote it originally is my father!

Well here's your problem

[BigSlowTarget]

Fire everyone, buy quickbooks is not an appropriate answer then?

Not to mention $40 million / 60k employees is $666 per employee - there's your problem. Its the payroll system of the Apocalypse (integer math only need apply).

Stanford's conversion

[Animats]

Stanford had a very expensive conversion to PeopleSoft a few years ago. Stanford had a huge collection of in-house systems from the 1970s and 1980s, running on either DEC PDP-10 machines or IBM mainframes. They've finally phased out all the PDP-10 based stuff at Stanford proper, although SLAC is still running some PDP-10 code.

Re:Stanford's conversion

[binaryspiral]

PeopleSoft is the devil's anus boil... every conversion I've seen to PS has been a loss in money, efficiency, and control.

But their sales force is top notch in convincing upper management (you know, those folks who will never actually have to use it) that they're going to go out of business with out it.

Re:Stanford's conversion

[Anonymous Coward]

All conversions to PeopleSoft are costly...

They tried Lawson first??? COBOL programmers?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's the funny part... They tried to implement Lawson first, where the core business processes are coded in... wait for it... COBOL!

Lawson's whole framework (unless things have changed in the last 5 years, it's been a while since I've worked with it) when running on windoze or UNIX basically emulates (poorly) a mainframe doing CICS transactions and then they have a couple layers on top of that to give it web interface. Even funnier is that running it on windoze requires an install of a basic *nix environment (similar to cygwin) so that the environment can run on top of that and then run it's COBOL/CICS-like environment (followed by another 2 layers to bring it to a browser).

I'm sure PeopleSoft will be so much better... :|

Moore's Law

[Jodka]

Because the cost of computer systems decreases with time, the expense of the new system should be lower than that of the one which it replaces. The University of Wisconsin was capable of either implementing or purchasing a functional payroll system in 1975 running on hardware of that era. According to Moore's law, simply replacing the existing 1975-vintage hardware with an equally powerful system in 2009 hardware should cost 1/2^17 as much as the 1975 system, that is .0000076 as much.

The article does not state what was the purchase price of the 1975 system. Assume that it was less than 2^17 * 28.4 million, that is, $3,722,444,800,000.00. Then the exponentially decreasing expense of computer hardware is not decreasing fast enough to offset the increasing incompetence of the University of Wisconsin.

Re:Moore's Law

[Pollardito]

It's not just a hardware issue, and programmer salary doesn't move in any direction exponentially. Also the original system likely didn't have to import 30 years of legacy payroll data that's formatted in a fashion that they probably don't completely understand, they probably just kept the printed records for that older data.

Re:Moore's Law

[Anonymous Coward]

the original system likely didn't have to import 30 years of legacy payroll data

I don't know the tax laws in Wisconsin or USA, but I can't believe that 30 years of old data would have to be imported. Under Canadian tax law, only a maximum of 7 years of data needs be kept. As a worst case, keep just enough of the old system around to be able to view the old data. After 7 years, scrap it.

Re:Moore's Law

[Ritchie70]

But of course the computer hardware isn't the issue.

I assume the laptop I'm typing this on has more raw computing power than the system they originally wrote their payroll system for. Maybe not the I/O throughput, but probably more CPU.

The problem is, nobody wants to just move the existing (probably COBOL) to new hardware. Assuming COBOL, that can probably be done fairly easily.

In 1975, they wanted to write something that would work on the hardware they had. That isn't what they want today.

My assumption is they want to re-architect it to be modern, more configurable (as opposed to changing code) and fully buzz-word compliant, in part driven by management that doesn't understand technology but does understand what the highly paid outside firm is telling them.

Re:Moore's Law

[brusk]

Actually that's false. For TAX purposes you may only need the past 7 years of data, but you absolutely need it for other purposes. For example, retirement funds may be based on how long someone's been employed at an institution. My employer recently offered a buyout to staff who'd been working there for over 25 years -- they could only perform the necessary query and identify the appropriate people if all those records were in the system. You also need the old information because people can be hired under old contracts and rules, and you need to know what those were. Tax isn't the only issue.

Outsource it along with the rest of HR

[xzvf]

Seriously, there are companies that do HR and can probably take over in a month. I don't understand why government organizations are the only ones that still have pensions and refuse to outsource tasks they don't do well. Payroll is simple and the deductions possible are well established any professional HR outsourcing company can handle it, plus be able to cleanly pass it to another company when their contract is up.

Re:FRIST!!!!

[knightghost]

They are trying to implement a dead product (Peoplesoft) for literally 6x to high a cost. Must be trying to make a completely custom system which is going to continue to cost many millions of dollars to support every year. What a colossal waste.

Re:FRIST!!!!

[Brian Gordon]

Hey, designing your own database backend has measurable performance benefits!

Efficiency

[Jodka]

The University of Wisconsin is a state-funded school, and as such is essentially a branch of government. When you are told that massive increases in government spending are necessary investments in the future of America, keep in mind that this is the kind of return which you will receive on that investment.

Re:Efficiency

[DrDitto]

Actually the University of Wisconsin-Madison (the flagship UW school) gets so little money from the state these days that it is within their rights to rename the school if they wanted. If I recall correctly, UW-Madison gets 10% of their budget funded from the state.

Re:Efficiency

[duffbeer703]

I've worked for government, small businesses and Fortune 50 corporations. In my experience, government is just as screwed up as a big corporation. The only difference is that most big corporations purge some people every year, and government tends to have more overhead of workers doing little/nothing.

It works out to be about the same. 15-20% of corporate people are busy sucking up to the boss and 15-20% of government people are making paper airplanes or whatever.

Government generally has professional staff who have some sort of clue, just like in the corporate world. The difference is that there is another layer(s) of management about the professional managers and directors -- political appointees. Usually the political types know they are dumb and stay out of the way, but sometimes they decide to flex their power -- resulting in many a dilbert moment.

Re:Efficiency

[wwwhippet]

That's the problem. The state has a very small voice in the direction of the school because it receives so little state funding.

Re:Efficiency

[Jodka]

According to this article appearing in The Capital Times of Madison Wisconsin:

...the federal government provided $657.1 million, or 28.8 percent, of UW-Madison's $2.28 billion budget for the 2007-08 school year.

...while the state provided $461.1 million, or 20.2 percent, of UW-Madison's budget...

So you omitted the federal funding and misstated the level of state funding. The actual level of state funding is about twice the figure you gave. The actual total level of government funding is 49% of the university budget, whereas you said 10%.

If the facts are not on your side then just make stuff up. The moderators will still rate that "Informative."

Re:Efficiency

[Jodka]

So $461.1 million is, in your own words, "so little state funding". Let me go out on a limb here; You are not one of those Libertarian, responsible government types, are you?

Re:Efficiency

[Anonymous Coward]

Bullshit. UW-Madison gets 25% of its TOTAL budget from the state. The main reason the percentage of state funding has gone down is the explosive growth in federally funded research and other grants that have increased the total budget of the University at a much faster rate than tuition or inflation or number of students. So the state percentage goes down. But state funding has increased much faster than the inflation rate the last decade. Its a bullshit argument you hear over and over. Taxpayers of Wisconsin support UW-Madison VERY generously. Biddy Martin, UW-Madison's chancellor has pointed out this flawed argument recently.

Re:Efficiency

[azgard]

I always also believed that the efficiency of government and large corporations is about the same, only that corporations cheat money out of each other by buying expensive stuff (so their inefficiency cancels out), but the government doesn't really cheat anyone (except maybe taxpayers), so its inefficiency won't cancel.

It's kinda like Pascal's law - companies are like molecules inside a vessel, government are like molecules that hit the walls, and taxpayers are the walls. And just like the walls feel the pressure of gas (though the pressure is everywhere the same), the taxpayers see being cheated by government (and thus think it is inefficient), but in reality, cheating occurs everywhere.

Re:Efficiency

[geekoid]

Oh shut up. This is no different then what any large organization goes through. The only difference is with government agencies it's public, where as in corporation it's buried.

Re:Efficiency

[geekoid]

Yes, that is very little state funding compared to the overall budget of the school; which is what he was talking about.

You people have no idea how much shit costs.

Re:Efficiency

[geekoid]

I find government work to ahve very little sitting adound and doing nothing. I am far busier then I ever was in the corporate world; which is where I have spent the bulk of my carrier.

I joke that I spent my entire life hearing how government workers don't do anything, and yet I am very busy. I should sue for false advertising~

If a private company does 99 things wrong and one thing right, and All you hear is the one thing they did right.
Government agency do 999 things right, and one thing wrong and it's all over the newspaper.
This tends to affect perceptions.
Most political types aren't dumb. Ignorant? certianly. In fact they often suffer from the Arrogance of ignorance logical fallacy. A logical fallacy that seems to be enjoying a revival in this thread.

Re:Efficiency

[multimed]

Get some perspective man! You seem to think that just because it is a small portion of the University's funding it is insignificant. It's nearly HALF A BILLION DOLLARS of that comes from me and my fellow Wisconsin taxpayers' money.

Re:What is so special about this university?

[Anonymous Coward]

Bah, Double Bah, and a BAH HUMBUG. Larger companies, other schools, states, and even federal departments have far more complicated pay systems implemented for far less money.

Step 1. Find some pay systems that are modern and working well at any other school in the US with the same requirements or more (you want scalable). There are going to be quite a few.
Step 2. Figure out what modifications would be required to meet the needs of the current employees and system.
Step 3. Get employee and management buy-in for conversion to the new system.
Step 4. Make sure you have a workable plan. Appropriate milestones, tied to performance metrics, tied to contract payouts.

Note: Get a decent project manager capable of actually managing a project of this scope. You know, someone with experience, technical expertise, and who is competent. Pay them. It's silly to balk at a $200-250k/year paycheck for someone able to effectively manage a project of 10's of millions dollars.

Whoever ran your current effort either got taken for a ride or helped take you for a ride. Either way, they need to go ASAP and someone who can perform needs to be put in.

Special complex system that is specific to State of Wisconsin is BS. Schools all over the country have the same little quirks, they are simple subroutines to the standard processes. There is no special UW voodoo.

Re:What is so special about this university?

[CorporateSuit]

Sounds about as complicated as my first-year Computer Info Systems semester project back in 2000. As a matter of fact, when I go home, I think I'll write one of these things for the hell of it, save it to my desktop, then delete it -- just as a speed challenge.

Idiots: outsource to Paychex, ADP, etc...

[Anonymous Coward]

SLA payroll services to professionals. You don't need a PhD to figure out the maths.

Go figure...

I just want to know

[microbee]

Who were fired?

Re:I just want to know

[multimed]

Well the first company working on the project, Lawson Software, was fired. Of course in this case, I wish I could be fired like they were. They got $28 million and obviously didn't actually deliver much of anything - which is why this second go-round (also late and grossly over budget) is a completely from scratch do-over.

Oracle?

[randomnote1]

What were they thinking? I have seen nothing but horrors with Oracle's front end applications. But seriously...how difficult is it to actually implement a decent payroll system?

Re:What is so special about this university?

[duffbeer703]

OMFG, you've figured it out! All of these years we've been supporting all of these complex systems, and all we had to do all of this time is avoid the complexities! You're a genius!

So, Kreskin, what do you do when one of the unions that represent a good chunk of your employees brings you to Federal court and wins a judgement requiring you to give workers employed between June 5, 1989 and December 31, 1994 who were on maternity leave a pension credit and healthcare refund equal to 8% of their average pension contribution during that period, paid in 104 bi-weekly portions?

Stuff like that happens all of the time. What are you going to do? Go to jail for contempt of court?

Ohio State University just spent $50M - it's still

[Anonymous Coward]

OSU just spent $50 million ($1000 per student) on a new student information system...and it's still broken. Classes start Monday, and most people don't have their financial aid yet.

Re:FRIST!!!!

[paazin]

frist

What is it with these fans of Senator Bill Frist and them always wanting to sound off about him at the start of every slashdot thread?

A university has lots of unpaid laborers

[kybred]

It's a university... they have thousands of undergrad CS students who can work for free. Just assign it as a 4 year project to the incoming freshmen and voila! In four years you have a system that cost $0!

And if it doesn't work, you give them all 'F's and start again with the next incoming class.

Re:A university has lots of unpaid laborers

[buttfscking]

I go to a UW school. Know this: you do not want a UW computer science student to touch your computer, let alone a project of this magnitude.

Re:A university has lots of unpaid laborers

[brusk]

They'll have to work for free under that system--the system you'd end up with won't be able to send anyone a paycheck.

Re:A university has lots of unpaid laborers

[Bysshe]

Right, because you really want 1000 18 yr old students having access to professor's salary information.

Re:A university has lots of unpaid laborers

[Provocateur]

"It's so crazy it just might work!" -- in a country/hick voice

Re:A university has lots of unpaid laborers

[ErikZ]

0$???

Hell, they're paying to attend your University. You can actually make money by having students develop this.

The University of Vermont went through this

[hansoloaf]

Not on that scale but still a hefty chunk of change nevertheless.

The cost and complexity of moving the entire payroll and finance system over to peoplesoft was so much that it lead to the resignation of the CFO of the university because he spent more without the authorization of the board - never mind that the board and the president pushed for this improvement knowing the budget will go over from $25 mil to $40 mil or so.

http://www.vermontnewsguy.com/tag/daniel-fogel/

Bottom line is that these type of projects are incredibly complex and no one really knows the long term costs when they get into it initially. But due diligence and oversight would be critical and helpful no doubt.

Re:The University of Vermont went through this

[Anonymous Coward]

Why don't they just install Quickbooks and be done with it

Re:FRIST!!!!

[fractoid]

I guarantee you that I could design and implement a database backend (and the rest of the system) for them for a fuckload less than $28 million, let alone $40mil all up.

Fire everyone who was in any way responsible for the old cock-up of an attempt and hire a few top students for $100k/year for a year when they graduate. That'll get the job done on time.

Re:FRIST!!!!

[MrBigInThePants]

I am a software architect and ex comp sci. lecturer.

I guarantee you are being exceptionally naive.

Par for Course for Peoplesoft Migrations

[Senjutsu]

$20 million+ rollouts for Peoplesoft systems on University campuses are the norm, not the exception. Their salesforce hooks in clueless upper management with tales of little customization and off-the-shelf savings, and then comes the roll-out consulting costs and news that any use of Peoplesoft for financials requires highly complex, site-specific customization at exorbitant consulting fees.

Data migration from the old mainframe systems always turns into a nightmare, cost overruns are legion, political pressure to meet deadlines causes internal staff to rack up huge overtime at huge cost, Oracle licensing runs well into 7 figure territory, etc, etc

This money was gone the second they selected a Peoplesoft "solution", management just didn't know it at the time

#1 Problem: Pigeon Management

[binaryspiral]

I've worked with folks involved with this decade long money pit - the problem can be directly blamed on management. Or, more specifically, the ever changing management.

From what I understand, the project is worked on for a few years and when there isn't a magical new system online, management is re-org'ed or replaced. This is essentially pigeon management - they fly in, crap on everything, and fly out.

Typically they scrap the old system during this change because the new management comes in with new ideas, programming methods, and vendors... the cycle of re-work, re-engineering, and re-lying on the old system continues while raking in big bucks for consultants and contractors... many I would expect are heavy gifting to the UW Alum and/or Wisconsin government lobby.

Fuck em all.

Re:FRIST!!!!

[Ex-MislTech]

There are modular open source payroll systems available, and as
they are open source you got the code to make the changes you need.

Ppl said moodle would not work as well, and well we know how
that is turning out.

If you Co-op this with a few other universities that are in the same boat, or can see that boat on the horizon you can split the costs, and give some post grad students something to turn in as a group project.

$40 million dollars for a payroll program reminds me of the $1 million USD oracle patches.

It makes me think, does this comes with complementary vaseline ?

Re:FRIST!!!!

[fractoid]

OK, maybe I should have put a disclaimer in there: "Unless, of course, the project is being kneecapped by constantly changing basic requirements, inter-departmental politics, and other external influences."

Regardless, a payroll system should not cost tens of millions of dollars to implement. If it does, you're doing it wrong.

That's funny...

[Anonymous Coward]

...it seems the broken payroll system is perfectly adequate for handling the 8-days-per-year furlough that fucktard Gov. Jim Doyle is forcing on all university faculty and scientific staff --- even those who are paid by grant funds and don't get a cent in state money.

Seriously, outsource it.. its what the big guys do

[Anonymous Coward]

Or for 25 Cents a transaction/employee you can have one of the many outsource companies do it for you including handling all of your direct deposits, deductions, direct payments, and everything else you can think of. The people in charge of this project should be fired for negligence.

I see the problem

[Anonymous Coward]

" He also said the subcontractor, Accenture, was playing a limited role and was well-qualified for the work. "

Yeah, sure. I've been unfortunate enough to work on other projects Accenture was doing for the State of Wisconsin. Those overran by millions of dollars and months overdue. At least one got mostly scrapped and redone after late delivery and numerous boondoggles. I'm not sure why they keep hiring these guys, when over and over and over they'd boned major, multi-million dollar jobs.

100% spot on

[codepunk]

Who wants a job doing a payroll system using a third party tool set based on old languages and technology....doomed from the start.

I don't know about the rest of you guys but I have never looked at our payroll drone and wished I had his job.

Re:What is so special about this university?

[Anonymous Coward]

what do you do when one of the unions that represent a good chunk of your employees brings you to Federal court and wins a judgement requiring you to give workers employed between June 5, 1989 and December 31, 1994 who were on maternity leave a pension credit and healthcare refund equal to 8% of their average pension contribution during that period, paid in 104 bi-weekly portions?

I'd cut a check, but that is just me.

Armchair Quarterbacking: Sungard Higher Education

[Nick Driver]

If they would've just simply bought the Sungard "Banner" system first, they would've had a complete turnkey system, in common use by dozens of other huge universities, and it would've already been implemented in about a 24-30 month cycle, including data conversion and end-user training, and probably would've come in less than $25M including all hardware, software, implementation fees, data conversion fees, and end-user training done on-site.

Re:FRIST!!!!

[WhiteHorse-The Origi]

I'll do it for $30 million!!

Re:FRIST!!!!

[pete6677]

Has there ever been a Peoplesoft implementation that wasn't a very expensive fuckup? I've certainly never heard of one. The only thing that amazes me about this pathetic excuse for software is that the scam lasted as long as it did before Oracle mercifully put them out of their misery.

Well, TimeTrex may be a good start...

[Anonymous Coward]

TimeTrex may be a good start... Its the only open source payroll and time management software that I've seen that is even remotely capable. Its extremely powerful and works great for organizations with many thousands of employees across multiple countries/states/unions.

Not only that but its currently used in some of the largest most well known Universities in the world.

load of crap

[Anonymous Coward]

complete load of crap
someone got rich out of this

we moved to alesco from a near manual system, for far more employees than described here within six months. this included
a test environment, face to face training and a rollback scheme.

the saddest part? i work for the public sector.

if cashed up university boffins cant figure out how to migrate only 60,000 people to a new payrole system, yet public sector (traditionally known for being lazy and unproductive) can do it with all our extra leave, allowances and perks then my view of seppos hasnt changed.

Some kids are profoundly ignorant.

[BrokenHalo]

Often it is a politician showing that he or she is completely ignorant of technical issues

Payrolls are hardly technically challenging. By way of perspective, 30 years ago I worked at a computer bureau, which for those too young to remember such a thing, was a shop where businesses brought in their handwritten input data on paper forms, and our keypunch ops would encode it on to mag tape for us to process on our Burroughs B3700 computer.

We ran our in-house payroll package for everything from public services to market gardens, and there is no reason why it wouldn't work just as well today, other than that it was written in COBOL, which isn't so trendy any more.

The world will be a better place when all the managers retire who were raised without computers.

The managers who used our packages were ALL raised without computers. That did not make them incapable or stupid. The world will be a better place when kids stop belittling their elders for no factual reason.

Re:Some kids are profoundly ignorant.

[knightghost]

A payroll is the single most complex part of an ERP. 30 years ago all you had to do was calculate a set salary, fed tax, state tax, and do a ton of manual labor. Now an average payroll has 1,500 queries per person per payroll, automated everything, etc.

Re:Some kids are profoundly ignorant.

[BrokenHalo]

No, not quite. This was in Europe, and the situation was considerably less prehistoric than what you describe. And the whole point was to automate everything - otherwise why bother?

Re:Some kids are profoundly ignorant.

[WillKemp]

The world will be a better place when kids stop belittling their elders for no factual reason.

The world will be a better place when the older generation don't give the kids so many reasons to want to belittle them. [I'm in my 50s btw.]

Re:Some kids are profoundly ignorant.

[Anonymous Coward]

and get off my lawn, you young "computer using" wippersnappers!

Re:Some kids are profoundly ignorant.

[plague3106]

The world will be a better place when kids stop belittling their elders for no factual reason.

You mean the elders that destoryed this country and left us without any real rights?

Re:Some kids are profoundly ignorant.

[geekoid]

Yes, they are technically challenging, but that's not the bulk of the cost.
Payroll today is tightly integrated to other aspect of the business.

Re:Some kids are profoundly ignorant.

[geekoid]

Add tot he cost needing to deconstruct how the current payroll is actually working to determine a varies amount of ways to calculate pay.

". And the whole point was to automate everything - otherwise why bother?"
true, but everything is a lot more now then ti was 30 years ago.

Re:Some kids are profoundly ignorant.

[tyen]

Payrolls are hardly technically challenging. By way of perspective, 30 years ago I...

Perhaps you haven't been in the business since then? Payroll systems today for large organizations are very complex because they often have to deal with tax jurisdictions around the world, and tax regulations have become quite a lot more complex since you worked at that computer bureau. In the university's case, simply accommodating visiting faculty can be a challenge. Then there is all the change control that surrounds tracking ever-changing tax laws. We haven't even begun to discuss benefits calculations, which are always related to payroll systems as many benefits impact what is deducted from a paycheck. The only payroll processes that are simple these days are the ones for very small businesses with a single locale and static benefits package, like your basic mom and pop restaurant down the street at the corner. Pretty much everyone else has multiple tax jurisdictions to deal with, especially with globalization pressures compelling many companies to do business around the world to survive.

This is why payroll processing companies like ADP are so popular with businesses; doing even multi-state payroll in-house is not easy by any stretch of the imagination. Pro tip: choose your payroll processor carefully, as they can skip with your tax deposits, and as long as the amount is below the FBI threshhold for caring about white collar crime, they can disappear with your funds with no repercussions. And the tax agencies don't care some scumbag just stole your tax deposits. That industry is completely unregulated, and is a scammer's wet dream come true as it is the perfect crime; businesses scammed like this are so panicked dealing with the now-pissed tax agencies they rarely have time/manpower/willpower to pursue the payroll processor. Now imagine what happens when the payroll processing takes place outside the country; good luck pursuing them in court overseas.

Re:Some kids are profoundly ignorant.

[BrokenHalo]

No, I haven't been out of the industry for 30 years: I have spent decades contracting in many countries and disciplines. There is no point in my going into a country-by-country analysis, but in practice you might be surprised to find that in most cases there is much left unchanged since the '50s and '60s. In any case, any such changes are codified, and are simple enough to accommodate in software. The point I was making is that this kind of system is not rocket science.

Pro tip: choose your payroll processor carefully, as they can skip with your tax deposits...

Yeah, that particular scam, and many others like it have been in circulation since (even!) before the period I was referring to. Just because they might not have made it to Wikipedia just yet doesn't mean we didn't know about them.

Re:Some kids are profoundly ignorant.

[Lost Race]

The world will be a better place when kids stop belittling their elders for no factual reason.

Yeah, that'll happen any day now. 10,000 generations in a row with no progress ... we're definitely due for it.

Re:Shutup slave! Git back ta whorek payin' yer Tex

[jdigriz]

*the* Alex Jones?

Send it to india

[Anonymous Coward]

For that kind of money, you can hand convert the entire thing with an army of data input people in India. Hell there are entire companies dedicated to just that sort of thing that likly do not clear $40 million in a year. This is all assuming the original system was so buggered that there is no way to automate any of it, which is highly unlikely.

Take a small percentage of the budget, and have a hit put out on the project manager. Problem solved.

Re:FRIST!!!!

[MrBigInThePants]

I am not defending their decision.

However I think that you believing that it would be real easy to solve their problems and reimplement their entire system using some OS software and grad students is even more naive than the original post.

I'll fix it..

[Wescotte]

Gimme the ~12million left you'll think it'll cost to fix and I'll handle the books the old fashion way. I'll cut checks by hand and be on call 24/7/365 for any/all problems related to it for the next 30 years.

Re:I'll fix it..

[geekoid]

hahaha. You would last 1 pay period.
Remember,. all issue need to be resolved in a business day and it's a system for thousands of people, and you need to apply changes to the rules on the fly.

Also taxes, MERP, insurance.

Simple Solution

[Tablizer]

A simply solution is to write an approximate payroll calculator, multiple the results by 15%, and just pay everyone a little extra. That way nobody complains and it keeps the system simple. (The hard part is hiding the padding from the auditors though.)

Out of the box solution

[mbeisser]

Excel anyone?

Re:What is so special about this university?

[n4djs]

Boy, they are going to love PeopleSoft - a whole crowd of people chasing after Oracle upgrades, PeopleSoft upgrades, and other general tomfoolery. Is PeopleSoft creating a new vertical in this..? If they are, it will take a long time for this to all to congeal...
The problem is that state and local governments can't keep good people in thier organizations because they don't pay enough to attract the best. This is going to become an ever increasing problem as more and more systems become mature and the implementors leave the scene....

Maintain Legacy system then create new System

[tg123]

Scratching my head on this one , just must be me.

Heres the steps I would take.

1) Backup - make sure everything is backed up.
2) Maintain the legacy system - That means finding who knows how to program / maintain it and pay them to train people.
3) Find a Company / Organization that has similar needs and has changed to a new system. Who makes there software?
4) Contact that software company. Get them to design a new system. (They have a proven track record)

Re:FRIST!!!!

[nicolas.kassis]

I have to agree with MrBigInThePants, I work for a large state university and I see the same waste but at the same time the complexity of the system is appaling. Unless you expect to be able to fix the inherent organizational problems the system will be so complex rule wise that you will be fixing random one off not anticipated bugs for ever. Large organization like that grow so disconnected and processes are so complex with many exceptions that a system like peoplesoft (even if it's the most half baked thing I've seen since blackboard) just can't drop in and work. It sucks but it's true.

Re:FRIST!!!!

[nicolas.kassis]

Sadly a LOT of systems university use are that expensive. Blackboard isn't cheap and it sucks. Moodle could work but many univeristies I've seen use it have had issues with professors and student complaints. Considering that now blackboard is a sort of portal for everything, Moodle is just being killed by the amount of features that need to be custom made (that were created for blackboard). In the end, if the universities poored half as much into moodle as they do yearly for blackboard. They'd have a awesome system that kills the competition. As for payroll, I've heard of some multi-university opensource projects in the works but they are taking a shit load of times because of politics and are built a platform I frankly don't find very quick for development (sorry, had to hate on Java stuff :) just can't help it).

Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

Glancing over the comments to this article, it's very obvious who are the people who have a respect for complex, legacy systems, and who are the people who have no fucking clue what they are talking about.

Re:Wow

[multimed]

Sure. But it's also very obvious which of those two groups the decision makers of the project were. This is the second go-round. The first resulted in $28 million to Lawson Software and a complete, from scratch do-over. Originally they said planning for this second try would cost $1.6 million. Later that became $8 million and now planning alone is going to cost over $12 million. I have no problem with a bunch of Slashdot posters not having respect for the difficulty of the task. I do have a major problem with elected and appointed officials, and people who are getting paid to manage this (whose salary comes from my taxes) not having the first clue about what the hell they're doing.

Re:FRIST!!!!

[nicolas.kassis]

I agreed, never seen any.

Re:FRIST!!!!

[knightghost]

I've implemented and upgraded full HR systems for corporations, hospitals, and universities, up to 250k people. I stand by the original estimates that this is 6x to high cost, using a dead product, and will cost many millions per year to support. It's a milk run for the conslutants.

Re:FRIST!!!!

[richardkelleher]

I have to believe there are hundreds of universities that already have working payroll systems. Look at as many as you can, select the one that works best, purchase the basic product, pay the university in question for their mods and steal their configuration. Get a bunch of work study students and a decent consultant or two to migrate your data. Project complete!

These people are just pissing money away on junk!

I worked for a company (large company, thousands of employees, worldwide sales and marketing, multiple manufacturing operations in multiple countries) that had a horrible 5+ year SAP implementation with obscene amounts of customization and they spent less that that!

Re:FRIST!!!!

[knightghost]

I have.

Wouldn't it be cheaper to start over?

[mosb1000]

40 million dollars! Maybe they should just tear the school down and build a new one.

This is crazy, you could pay 100 programmers for five years before you'd spend that much money! Are they following the Microsoft software development process? That only works if you have a lot of money to throw away and it doesn't matter that your end product doesn't work.

Re:Wouldn't it be cheaper to start over?

[geekoid]

Yes, if you only needed programmers, you might ahve a point. Programmers are the SMALLEST group of people you must have.

and a programmer is going to cost 150K+.
SO that's actually 75,000,000 dollar you would have spent in that 5 years.

And nothing works better then managing, documenting, testing, maintaining, training, busines process discovery all being done by the programmer doing the programming~

Re:Wouldn't it be cheaper to start over?

[mosb1000]

This is a strange attitude to have.

Managing - The best managers are familiar with the work being done. For example, I have three bosses, two of them are geologists, and one is an engineer. I can't imagine what it would be like working under someone who didn't know how to do my work (at least a little).

Documenting - Who do you think should be documenting the work?

Testing - This should be done by the developers and by the staff who will use the system.

Maintaining - I hope to god you plan to have a programmer maintaining the system.

Training - Aren't the programmers the only ones who can do the training, since they are the only ones who know how the system works? Or should they train some trainers who will train the staff. That seems inefficient to me.

Busines process discovery - I'm not sure what that is.

Of course, you do need administrators, and they will not be programmers. But I didn't say you could only hire programmers, I said you could hire a lot of programmers for a long time with that kind of money.

150K+ seems steep to me, since 100 programmers would probably mean mostly entry-level programmers with a few more experienced ones. You certainly could find 100 programmers, and pay them for 5 years with benefits for $40 million. I won't guarantee the quality, but you could do it.

There is simply no excuse for this system to cost this much money.

GIGO

[Saysys]

U of W is well known for having one of the best computer information systems departments in the US. The problem is not that they can not get the problem solved with drop-in software, the problem is that a university is a pile of idiosyncratic rules and exceptions that do not work rationally in real life.

They are trying to get a computer to act rationally after giving it an irrational input. User error is not the culprit, user created data flows are.

Re:GIGO

[Anonymous Coward]

"U of W is well known for having one of the best computer information systems departments in the US."

I don't believe that.

Re:GIGO

[Hognoxious]

There's an old proverb that says: If you see a kid with bare feet, he's probably the cobbler's son.

Consultants

[rs79]

" How can an upgrade cost $40m? "

Hello. In understand your problem and have special expertise that will enable you to understand. Just sign this PO for $1.2 and out consulting team will immediately begin to undertake a feasability study to help you understand the question.

Now if you'll just pass me your watch I'll tell you what time it is.

Bug in CSS on /. ? (xp opera 10)

[rs79]

Looks like somebody left out a close table data cell. Sometime after midnight reply started behaving very oddly.

Given there's articles about opera this week is it really too much to expect that changes are tested in opera?

http://rs79.vrx.net/.oops/slashdot/oops7.jpg

Re:Bug in CSS on /. ? (xp opera 10)

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

Slashcode has been acting up for at least a month. I'm encountering css errors everywhere on the old index in Firefox 3. I suspect that the old index is being quietly ignored by the developers. I don't care. I'm not using that Ajax monstrosity to read comments.

I bet a group of students can fix it in 4 Months

[Qbertino]

I bet a group of enthusiatic CS/IT students with programming skills and maybe one teacher with real life experience can build and/or fix this in 4 months. Give them the tools, have them prepare by giving them access to all personell doing payroll stuff and familiar with the process of payroll and pay them a good salary plus a bonus if they finish it before next winter-semester is over. Give them option to do their thesis or degree paper on the project. Add in a few law students if complicated German-style tax stuff is involved for some extra interdisciplinary flavour and results.

Voila! Top-of-the-line payroll system for something like 100 000$. ... And, sadly, I also bet that that won't happen, because then someone would have to admit that he burned 20+ Million on a project that was implemented start to finish with less than a tenth the money. Sometimes the sad and sorry state of our profession in some places makes me want to cry.

Re:FRIST!!!!

[umghhh]

One can see it also from another angle - they obviously can afford such 'appalling complexity' and obscure structures and pay the consequences or otherwise they would have fixed it already. I have impression that if the money source dries out the payroll system problem may get resolved in no time together with some other problems (none of them really having to do with technology and software) this university obviously has.

Re:What is so special about this university?

[rs79]

(I've done stuff like this, in the 70s, in Dibol and in C).

Even if you have to parametrize rules for each employee so they're unique this really isn't
a big deal. And if you parametrize it per employee and campus you may as well write it so
it can be used for any american university in any state.

Make youtube videos for training. That could take a whole week to do.

Make it all intranet webforms.

One software package and any college or university can use it.

The more people you throw at this the longer it will take.

In the end it comes down to "how many hours or days did this guy work, what's his rate and what are the exceptions" and it spits out an amount to ACH to his account. I don't care how complicated the exceptions are, it's not rocket science.

It's only scary of you haven't done it before.

I'll do it for half a million in one year. I may need to hire one other person. Maybe not.

Pen and paper

[Anonymous Coward]

I've could set up a cheaper system with a longer product life then the $40M one in a couple of weeks.

I'd just use pen, paper and trained monkeys in shirts.

But that is why you are a programmer.

[Anonymous Coward]

An administrator, politician or manager who is good will sort those problems out so you can mirror the new situation in your technical solution.

In one occasion I had 50 machete wielding farmers complaining about a client's process, basically my client was marking the plots of land in a place where private ownership of land was introduced for the first time, the measurements in the field were not matched by the system's results, as a consequence some people were given deeds referencing smaller plots than they actually had.

They were not happy (and brought their machetes, which I can tell you, were not an empty threat).

Between my client's manager and yours truly we talked to them about what the problem was and the solution (consider that many or they were illiterate, not only computing illiterate...)

For some of us negotiating with an angry union will frankly be a walk in the park.

'A language so old'

[dugeen]

"The program, developed in 1975, is written in a computer language so obsolete that few programmers know how to fix it." How about some details - which language? MAD? NELIAC? TRAC? CPS? Culler-Fried system? Python?

Nonsense.

[jotaeleemeese]

I worked in a big university doing complicated IT stuff in school administration. I am 100% positive our team did not have the expertise necessary to have migrated all our systems and processes from COBOL and ALGOL programs (yeah, that is what it was) to a RDBMS (which was not a novel idea even back then), let alon an ERP.

I have met many people working in Universities, both in administrative roles and in research, they simple don't have the expertise required to take such a huge migration project to a happy ending (there is no shame on admiting that, I am sure people working in consultancies could not get their heads around some of the stuff people in research centres are doing, they may have a better chance ate understanding administrative stuff , but even that is not a given. We have specialization for a reason).

Re:FRIST!!!!

[sgbett]

I think they need to evaluate which would be cheaper:

1. cost of a system based on more regorously defined business process + cost of implementing rigourous business process.
2. cost of a system based on wildly varied and loose requirements + cost of continuing to run your business like this.

I'm not so naive as to think I could do it all myself on a shoestring (I'd give it a good go though!) but $28million is a fuck load of money. Seriously.

I know what they could not find anybody.

[jotaeleemeese]

But I will not tell you. You don't deserve to know....

As compared with what?

[Anonymous Coward]

Citigroup, ENRON, Merril Lynch, AEG, Parmalat?

Stop beating governments as inherently inefficient, it seems that inefficiency has to do more with human nature in general ...

how I would have done it ..

[viralMeme]

"The University of Wisconsin is attempting to update a payroll system they have had in place since 1975"

Move to app to an emulator running on current hardware. Adapt the app to what ever changes are necessary. Move the app to run natively on current hardware. Don't use the same people who squandered $28.4 in the previous attempt.

Before you bet...

[jotaeleemeese]

What are you basing your optimism in?

I (and many other old timers on this thread) are telling you in no uncertain terms how the cookie crumbles, so what is your evidence that what you are saying could actually be done in the way you say?

What you are suggesting is stupid and naive (a word I have seen used several times on this thread, and rightly so), that you are moderated "Interesting" a the moment just comes to show how few people in /. are familiar with the complexities of such systems.

Re:Before you bet...

[multimed]

You're most certainly right. But in one case, after a semester and $100k you're left without a solution. In the other, after a few years and $50 million (when all is really said & done) you're left without a solution. We already paid $28 million to the first failed attempt at this project. You'll have to forgive me, but as a Federal and Wisconsin state taxpayer, former UW student and current UW donor, I think I'll rather let the prof & kids take a whack at it.

Re:Before you bet...

[Anonymous Coward]

Our "elders" tend to throw around big, scary, "complex-looking" words around to make us do/not do lots of things. I think you spouting your nonsense in here is the exact same thing. If the requirements stage is properly done by professional analysts, then the coders have an easy time. There is nothing "complex" here.

COBOL, you say? Seriously, if it's the same type of programming paradigm (which it is), then a competent coder can learn it. And as far as I can tell, COBOL doesn't have a myriad of libraries to learn, just a of few hundred set functions. Wow, that's such a hard thing to learn, let's pay one of YOU guys a crap load of money so you can "show us how to program in COBOL", nonsense. I don't think so. Besides, what do _you_ know that a COBOL textbook doesn't? Oh, wait, that's right... You've got big mean scary words!

Ok, so the programmers now know the language used, so they can make heads and tails of the old source code. And they also have a well defined list of requirements to fulfill. What's left? Where's the big scary monster? Oh and don't bother throwing big scary words at me like "taxes" and "unions". That's the job of the analysts, who are professionals, and will hire professional lawyers and accountants to help them.

Therefore, I fully agree with the GP, a bunch of CS students could do this in half a year, no problem.

-XcepticZP

Re:Before you bet...

[Qbertino]

What are you basing your optimism in?

23 years of hands-on software developement experience.

I (and many other old timers on this thread) are telling you in no uncertain terms how the cookie crumbles, [...]

Guess we need a drumroll tag in slashdot.
Pardon me, pal, but I know very much myself 'how the cookie crumbles', thank you.

Let me give you an extreme example:
I know mid-twenties CS grads who have done more in half an hour with a well coded SED script than an 20-head team of middleware consultants in two years. That is not an exaggeration. The entire middleware between Sonys mobile multimedia plattform and vodaphone europe mobile service (a Java behemoth beyond any imagination) was replaced with a single SED script a colleague of mine built in 30 minutes and placed on the right intersection. He scored 30 000 Euros for the job and a follow-up contract to maintaint the entire plattform that rakes in 15 000 per month to this day.

Another example:
My very first real-life python programm was a 150 line script for a friends online media business that connected the 4 million entry database of Germanys largerst distributor of books, Libri (largerst automated/robotic distribution center in the world, 30 000 deliveries per hour, 24/7, less than 100 personell in fullfillment at any given time), with our online distribution channels, including the then brand new amazon market place. I wrote the script in 3 weeks while learning Python and spend most of my time dicking around the web looking at FOSS webkits and help setting up my friends online business. I actually wrote it in something like 15 hours and most of it was figuring out and testing the monster regexes required to filter the datastream we got from printer signals. 2 weeks into integrating the script into our regular pipeline Libri EDI Sales management and the data dept. called us and asked us how we generated the 3000% increase in throughput, where we got the 4 Million datasets from without using their bizar software behemoth priced at 5000 per year in licencing. My friend told them we were filtering their data of the free-client printer option after printing out a search for the space character, which naturally returned all datasets. We got a personal invitation to and tour of their facilities and got an exclusive distribution deal at zero cost. And were among the first to try out a XML option later on which we suggested (sometimes Captain Obvious doesn't stand a chance with the pointy-haired partner and need extra help) which made the script obsolete just as fast as I had written it.

Another example:
Did you ever notice how on amazon marketplace the third-party prices often are only cents appart and the cheapest offer allways is on top? That's price-combat at its finest and I was the first to automate it. With another single python script under 1000 lines in length. *Before* the Amazon API for that part was available. I wrote it in less than 20 hours.

I could go on like this for hours, but the bottom line is:
I have countless examples where entire ERP, SCM, Billing, Payment and Fullfilment setups have been replaced by a handfull of PHP, Python or Perl CLI scripts and have sped up the processes covered tenfold and more for *everyone* involved, including secretaries who sometimes even had to learn a handfull of Bash commands. Which they gladly did, as it spared them the alternative of an extra 10 hours per week in front of bloated unwieldy, slow, braindead and cookie-cutter SAP-style interfaces.

Give me a small (less than 10) team with one or two experienced leaders and the rest motivated programming enthusiasts + access to the people *directly* involved in the processes in question - and I will automate *anything* in 6 months, except maybe embedded military, avionics, critical medical software and mission critical space flight software stuff. Simply because that all is a totally different league due to testing and DBC requirements.

Trust me, with the things I mentioned in the parent post, building a payroll kit for a university - no matter how large it is - is absolutely doable and could actually turn out to be a walk in the park. And a fun one at that.

Four good coders could "do-over" a payroll system

[Anonymous Coward]

Because "All You Have to Do Is...."

The deadliest words in IT.

Remember - kids can program. Kids can bandage cut fingers. Now, do you want a kid to do your liver transplant?

Re:FRIST!!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Based on your username, I think you are too.

ZING!

Re:I bet a group of students can fix it in 4 Month

[Anonymous Coward]

What a load of absolute crap!

As one who has had the pleasure of 'help' from 'enthusiatic CS/IT' students, let me tell you, they know FUCK about developing real applications. They wouldn't know where to start.

Re:What is so special about this university?

[pbhj]

[...] Federal court and wins a judgement requiring you to give workers employed between June 5, 1989 and December 31, 1994 who were on maternity leave a pension credit and healthcare refund equal to 8% of their average pension contribution during that period, paid in 104 bi-weekly portions?

Stuff like that happens all of the time. What are you going to do? Go to jail for contempt of court?

How longs the jail term?

Re:FRIST!!!!

[EddyPearson]

"I guarantee you are being exceptionally naive."

Can you give us some idea of why?

I too am a software developer (and project manager), and "I'll build it for half the price" was the first thing that popped into mind. I could hire a team of world class coders for a year and still have a tens of millions left for the beer money.

FTA:
"The project requires much more extensive planning and analysis than we originally predicted and we are committed to a very thorough planning process," he said. "We know that is key to success."

This sounds like Software Engineering 101, ie. don't start coding until you know what the fuck it is you're trying to produce.

Also FTA: "Moreover, a company fired over subpar work creating Wisconsin's statewide voter database in 2007 is working as a subcontractor on the project."

So to me, the obvious problem here is they hired cowboys to do the job. Have I missed something? I could start and run a consultancy firm for 3-4 years, off the inital investment alone.

I'm perfectly willing to be proven wrong, so can you give us some idea of the pitfalls that could occur (bearing in mind that I have $28m to throw at any potential problems)?

The Management should be fired

[y86]

The management should be fired for allowing such a complicated payroll system to exist. How hard is it to pay a salary.... these type of morons(I mean Elite) could mess up a wet dream.

Re:FRIST!!!!

[Weeksauce]

Well at least all they are doing is shouting his name unlike supporters of Ron Paul who always feel the need to constantly remind you of their own superiority.

Subcontractor is Accenture

[daemonenwind]

The design/development/implemention is being done by Accenture, formerly Andersen Consulting.

Need I say more?

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/chi-ap-wi-uwsystempayroll,0,2597575.story

Payroll Systems are easy

[MooseDontBounce]

I really can't believe this story. I wrote a integrated Payroll/HR application in 2 years (plus received a US patent for part of it) myself for a major steel corporation in the early 1990's using Clipper! It did all timecard entry, had user-defined union rules, and tax rules. It did taxes for US & Canada plus 21 states. All user defined and maintainable. Printed laser MICR-checks, W2's, direct deposit, retirement and pension calcs, etc. etc. etc. It was used for 15 years until the company was bought out. How fraking stupid are these people? As a side note. You have NEVER felt pressure as when 2000+ United Steel Worker checks are wrong and you don't know why! (It was (L)user error)

Re:Payroll Systems are easy

[geekoid]

aDoubtfull.
I wrote a financial system in clipper as well.

"(It was (L)user error)"
No, it was a lack of a business rule checking.

Re:FRIST!!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been working on a custom payroll system for about 18 months now. So far, it has cost the client about $38K. It includes payroll functions, forecasting, and even some invoicing features. Now, I'm sure it would die a horrible death if I tried to make it handle the 25K or whatever employees of UW, but it would not take me $40,000,000 to scale it to the point where it would be able to handle that many users.

Break the solution down into parts

[TheEnigma]

I think that everyone's thinking about this the wrong way. Computers automate processes, but that doesn't necessarily mean that the entire process needs to be automated from the minute it's turned on. This fundamental, flawed assumption is always at the heart of these kinds of fiascos.

If you can write a program to do it, you can also design a manual process. But more importantly, if it's a complex process, you can first break it up into sub-processes, and then automate the parts that involve tasks that are already well understood, and have existing implementations, and do the rest manually. Then replace the manual parts with automated processes piece by piece. The monolithic replacement approach is ridiculous. The side benefit of a hybrid automated/manual approach is that the algorithms and procedures are transparent, and non-programmers can learn them, understand them, critique them, improve them and finally describe them in a form which can be automated. Once manual processes stabilize, they could probably be scripted easily enough, as an intermediate step before conversion to fully custom code modules.

Now, this would have to be managed, of course, and there would have to be some kind of standards imposed for data formats, but assuming all of the raw data is always digital, and the manual work is mostly comprised of moving the output from one automated step to the next automated step, you would have an ad hoc system that could be evolved into a custom system, while always working the whole time.

Of course, given that they already have a working system, they should in fact simply be replacing elements of the existing system with modern replacements, one at a time. They could write adapter layers between the existing parts and the replacement parts. It's clear from the description that the system is distributed, running on multiple (hundreds, thousands?) of computers.

I'm not saying it would be easier or cheaper, but it would work from the get-go, and evolve, and by the time it was finished, the users would already be trained and management could have high confidence that the system worked.

Re:FRIST!!!!

[geekoid]

No, you are wrong. These systems are hugly complex and filled with about ab hyojillion business rules that were ad on an ad hoc basis over the life time of the payroll system.

All large project like this will have changing business requirements.

You are clearly inexperienced. And you comment about getting fresh graduates to do it is a hoot as well.

Re:FRIST!!!!

[geekoid]

Every large organizations replacing a payroll system costs that much or more.
It has nothing to do with it being a university.

Care to cite an Open Source large scale payroll system?
Even then the cost is in the implementation.

Re:FRIST!!!!

[geekoid]

YUo to are benig niave. I suggest you do a couple of these before yappingh off like a small annoying dog.

"I could hire a team of world class coders for a year
This tells me you ahve in incredible myopic view of when goes into a system like this.
World class coders? well world class coders go for 300 an hour, to START.

YOu also have:
Business analyst, documentation, testers, training adding staff to handle the extra workload while people are training, QA, legacy data retention, new systems, space for the new systems.

"This sounds like Software Engineering 101, ie. don't start coding until you know what the fuck it is you're trying to produce."
Sounds like ignorance 101. Do you know howmuch it cost to completely document a legacy system? figure out all the business rules? then review them against current contracts and rules? Any clue at all about real world 30 year old systems?

Time to step up to the real world.

""Moreover, a company fired over subpar work creating Wisconsin's statewide voter database in 2007 is working as a subcontractor on the project.""
  Too little information.

"So to me, the obvious problem here is they hired cowboys to do the job. "
Where did you get that from?

"? I could start and run a consultancy firm for 3-4 years, off the inital investment alone.
one that does this size projects? no, no you couldn't.

Well teh first pitfall is that yu don't seem to ahve a clue how much people cost, overall.

This sint'; read system docs, then implement new system. This is do cnostruct the system, get all the business rules and actual calculations and rules. ON a moderat to large system, that can take 18-24 months, 12-20 consultants and internal staff.
there's 8-15 million right there.
The you still eed those people and many developers both from the consultants and internally.
And this assume descent management that knows how to determine stake holders and focus meetings.
Poorly managed it could cost 4 times that much, and then fail.

I've done this many times, and been on both sides of the fence.

Now, I don't know anything about this system or situation but the price for an organization this size isn't unheard of.

You statement is typical of someone who is suffering from arrogance of ignorance.

Copy another school?

[highlander76]

Can't they just copy another school? This seems like a wheel that doesn't need ot be reinvented. They could just go ask the University of Minnesota ... oh, wait, what was I thinking? Badgers can't go asking Gophers for help.

WT?

[Anonymous Coward]

This is outrageous.

You mean to tell me it is impossible to break the project down into finite cost controlled pieces?

One thought comes to mind is paying poor and hungry graduate students $20 bucks an hour to do all the heavy lifting for the project, while asking the UW-Madison PhD students to project manage the pieces and parts.

All part time. Seems like a win win scenario to me.

Students get work to help pay for school, Grad students get work experience for resume's and PhD students get to contribute to a place they love. :-)

But, apparently giving a bunch of dumb arse's who are a KNOWN Tax Cheat, changed their name because they USE to be known as the company that stole Little Old Ladies Pensions at Enron (Arthur Andersen), millions is a better idea.

(i.e. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accenture )

I like how the Wiki says they did not change their name because of all of the corruption....LOL...of course not, it is actually a little known market fact to keep bad brand names as your company name because it increases business.

LOL

They really need to do something about the Wiki security on the internet because companies now have thier own disinformation departments that are of this size.

Whatever.

-Hack

Ohio State went through this in the late 90's

[JimBobJoe]

Ohio State was one of the first (if not the first) universities to transition to Peoplesoft. Originally budgeted at $10-12 million the project ended up costing $100-$120 million.

I'm not sure how projects today are done, but Peoplesoft was running on NT 3.51 servers and people accessed the program by opening up a Citrix Winframe session.

At that time, Peoplesoft had never really done a university project before, and found that the corporate payroll package that it had was entirely inadequate for the university setting. (Supposedly they now have a college/university payroll package.)

Re:FRIST!!!!

[fractoid]

You missed an important point: 'top' students. As you will well know, since you're very experienced, top software engineers are worth far more than average ones. Experience does help, but will in no way close the gap. In my experience, a best-in-class 3rd year student will be a better developer than a middle-of-the-road one with 10 years experience.

Re:What is so special about this university?

[Anonymous Coward]

"What are you going to do? Go to jail for contempt of court?"

Get a good lawyer and have him figure out how to settle.

Re:I bet a group of students can fix it in 4 Month

[Ronald Dumsfeld]

I've developed mainframe software in COBOL. It isn't difficult, but you've obviously no clue as to what is involved.

Are your enthusiastic students going to read all the legislation that impacts this new system? Are they going to document all the contractual obligations that do not fit into a cookie-cutter formula? Are they going to write functional specifications from poorly-documented parts of the old system?

No, a few law students aren't going to cut it

Besides, you don't want CS students. You want competent software engineers.

Re:I bet a group of students can fix it in 4 Month

[johnny0099]

Yes, let's bet. I'll even let you name the odds.

Re:Distillation

[wilder_card]

Actually most colleges don't get to this stuff at all. There's way too much computer science to cram into four years. If you're lucky there's one or two courses on software engineering, which barely scratch the surface of what's needed for the real world. If it was up to me we'd train programmers for 6 or 8 years, but for now the only way to learn this stuff is painful experience.

Re:FRIST!!!!

[danw5k1]

They're probably trying to modify people soft to look and feel just like their existing process. Retraining is expensive, so they're just going to have to customize the software.

Re:I bet a group of students can fix it in 4 Month

[Anonymous Coward]

No you are wrong. You need competent, professional software analysts to give the CS students a functional specifications document.

Stop blaming everything except the code bugs on the coders.

-XcepticZP

Re:FRIST!!!!

[MrBigInThePants]

Pretty much what geeoid said more or less.

You are underestimating the complexity of such systems by an order of magnitude.

What I fin most funny (and naive) about all the posts of your nature is that you have NO IDEA what the original system looks like and have not spoken to any of the people involved and you are sooooo sure that you can do it all.

Yup. So how long have you been a PM??

"The problem with project managers is that they have the word 'manager' in their name."

- me, one of my favourites.

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