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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."
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.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
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.
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.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
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.
Mooniacs for iOS and Android
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.
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.
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.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
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.
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.
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
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?
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
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.
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.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
this is why we need to get rid of 99% of these fucking laws and live in a free society again
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.
I am a software architect and ex comp sci. lecturer.
I guarantee you are being exceptionally naive.
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.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
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.
Got Code?
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.
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'.
... 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.
... 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.
... 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.
My response?? 'Sir
No
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
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.
I rarely read replies, it's my opinion and if you thought about your opinion a little more, I'm OK with that.
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.
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
Worldwide Military budgets: $2100 billion. Worldwide Space Exploration budgets: $38 billion. Really, world? Really?
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.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.