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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."
frist
Peppy: Do a 30-Year-Old Payroll! spend $40 Million twice
How can an upgrade cost $40m?
I would totally sign up to do this job.
Why?
I just want to say how glad I am my tuition's going to a good cause.
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.
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
What is U of Wisconsin doing that they are unable to use a system developed for other universities with some minor tweaks? Is this a case of too many "cooks" wanting to add their own modules for odd requirements? Is some treehugger demanding a carbon footprint fine system to penalize staff that drive SUVs and have too big of a house? I cannot even begin to imagine the amount of excessive overhead they are paying for all involved in this project. Doesn't this school have a computer science department? I am sure they could get some grad students to help do this all in house.
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
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
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.
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.
So you get a few linux boxes and put paymaster or any other Open Source on it.
Done.
Cost: 50,000 with labor...
Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.
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?
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
(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.
Nice catch.
But you'll notice I am readily farming that out.
I love it when you talk dirty like that! Gimme some more, and say it in a hoarse whisper!
This Paymaster?
Maybe...
just maybe...
we can call it "The Looney-versity of Wisconsin".
Would be appropriate.
Because the old system IS the specification.
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?
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.
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 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.
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... :|
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.
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
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.
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.
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
SLA payroll services to professionals. You don't need a PhD to figure out the maths.
Go figure...
Who were fired?
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?
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.
And if it doesn't work, you give them all 'F's and start again with the next incoming class.
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.
~280MB MPEG hoff of areX about 7000/5 Distro is done Here
$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
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.
...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.
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.
" 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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
*the* Alex Jones?
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.
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.
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.)
Table-ized A.I.
Excel anyone?
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)
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.
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.
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.
" 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 $1.2 and out consulting team will immediately begin to undertake a feasability study to help you understand the question.
Now if you'll just pass me your watch I'll tell you what time it is.
Need Mercedes parts ?
Looks like somebody left out a close table data cell. Sometime after midnight reply started behaving very oddly.
Given there's articles about opera this week is it really too much to expect that changes are tested in opera?
http://rs79.vrx.net/.oops/slashdot/oops7.jpg
Need Mercedes parts ?
I bet a group of enthusiatic CS/IT students with programming skills and maybe one teacher with real life experience can build and/or fix this in 4 months. Give them the tools, have them prepare by giving them access to all personell doing payroll stuff and familiar with the process of payroll and pay them a good salary plus a bonus if they finish it before next winter-semester is over. Give them option to do their thesis or degree paper on the project. Add in a few law students if complicated German-style tax stuff is involved for some extra interdisciplinary flavour and results.
Voila! Top-of-the-line payroll system for something like 100 000$. ... 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.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
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.
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.
"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?
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).
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
But I will not tell you. You don't deserve to know....
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
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 ...
"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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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
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)
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.
Stand back. I've got a brain and I'm not afraid to use it.
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.
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 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.)
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.
Where's the Kaboom?
There's supposed to be an Earth-shattering Kaboom.
Yes, let's bet. I'll even let you name the odds.
Get your dogma outta my yard!
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.
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
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