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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."
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
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.
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.
Do you even know anything about perl? -- AC Replying to Tom Christiansen post.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Hey, designing your own database backend has measurable performance benefits!
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.
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.
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?
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
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?
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.
I am a software architect and ex comp sci. lecturer.
I guarantee you are being exceptionally naive.
$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.
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.
The preferred solution is to not have a problem.
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 ?
google "32 trillion offshore needs IRS attention"
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.
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
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.
I'll do it for $30 million!!
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
.sig withheld by request
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?
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....
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)
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.
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).
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.
I agreed, never seen any.
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.
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!
I have.
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.
wish there was a tag that was, "LOL -1"
Sig Return: 204 No Content
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 $1.2 and out consulting team will immediately begin to undertake a feasability study to help you understand the question.
Now if you'll just pass me your watch I'll tell you what time it is.
Need Mercedes parts ?
I bet a group of enthusiatic CS/IT students with programming skills and maybe one teacher with real life experience can build and/or fix this in 4 months. Give them the tools, have them prepare by giving them access to all personell doing payroll stuff and familiar with the process of payroll and pay them a good salary plus a bonus if they finish it before next winter-semester is over. Give them option to do their thesis or degree paper on the project. Add in a few law students if complicated German-style tax stuff is involved for some extra interdisciplinary flavour and results.
Voila! Top-of-the-line payroll system for something like 100 000$. ... 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
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.
(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.
Need Mercedes parts ?
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.
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.
Invaders must die
But I will not tell you. You don't deserve to know....
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
"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.
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.
May the Maths Be with you!
[...] 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?
"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)?
You feel sleepy. Close your eyes. The opinions stated above are yours. You cannot imagine why you ever felt otherwise.
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.
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.
An inventor is a man who asks 'Why?' of the universe and lets nothing stand between the answer and his mind.
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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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.)
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.
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
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.
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.
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.