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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."
I just want to say how glad I am my tuition's going to a good cause.
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
As I understand it, they've totally scrapped the old system and are starting over from scratch using PeopleSoft - which they should have done from the beginning rather than trying to roll their own solution.
So yeah the title is misleading; it's a $12 million system. And that includes deployment across 24 campuses statewide, training costs, etc.
Do you even know anything about perl? -- AC Replying to Tom Christiansen post.
Re-engineering a 30 year old system that's been accreting features for 30 years, though, isn't an easy task.
for $10M per dude, it doesn't have to be. I'll bugfix this thing with badgers gnawing on both my arms for that kind of pay.
I am the richest astronaut ever to win the superbowl.
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
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.
PeopleSoft is not a commercial payroll vendor.
It is an ERP system, the payroll module needs to be heavily customized for any large implementation.
If they need an ERP, fine... but then it's not just a payroll system costing $12 MM additional, is it?
Serves me right for NRTFA, but *some* accuracy could *maybe* be hoped for?
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
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.
Theres an infinite amount of shame that you accrue once you go to PeopleSoft. I don't know of anything better, but PeopleSoft is a steaming pile of shit, much like any other enterprise tool that tries to do it all. Its all just fodder that managers eat up like hotcakes because of the promise of higher productivity, and won't change until the next generation of IT professionals comes in and kicks the old clods off their thrones. Now that we have a generation of IT professionals that were born and grew up in a world with computers, I have plenty of optimism that enterprise bloatware like PeopleSoft (Microsoft *, Novell, FootPrints, Cadence, etc) will slowly but surely be replaced by modular programs that actually do a task, and do it well.
"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.
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.
Even with specs, the hard part of a payroll system is known all of the tax rules and regulations to start with, then toss in the byzantine local rules such as the pay grades and union seniority rules. Then when this is done, be prepared to change it again each year as the rules change.
Payroll systems tend to have a lot of people on staff maintaining them. Which is why a lot of corporations just outsource it all if they can.
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.
I love it when you talk dirty like that! Gimme some more, and say it in a hoarse whisper!
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.
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.
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.
The $12m is just for the planning. They originally though $8 million would be enough but it wasn't. The UW payroll system (really HR system) has to take care of around 60,00 employees at several campuses plus county extension branches. There are all sorts of job descriptions with different contracts, vacation, sick leave, seniority, retirement plans, insurance, etc. The previous failure was an embarassment and some reporter figured they could stir up some trouble by making a big deal out of this. It's better that they get all the processes sorted out before they start writing custom code.
A dyslexic man walks into a bra.
My, aren't we quite the bigot. This is going to come as quite a surprise to you, but, there's a lot of people in the world. Some of those "old clods" are actually intelligent, knowledgeable and experienced in their fields, including IT. Hell, some of them even post on Slashdot, I imagine.
And, at least one of them thinks that, in addition to being a bigot, you're also an asshole.
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
You still need the ERP. It's not like you get together a box with all of the goofy union contracts and agreements, court-ordered judgements, and byzantine business rules, fedex it to ADP, and magically get your paychecks to come out the other end.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
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'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
And if it doesn't work, you give them all 'F's and start again with the next incoming class.
this is why we need to get rid of 99% of these fucking laws and live in a free society again
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.
Now that we have a generation of IT professionals that were born and grew up in a world with computers, I have plenty of optimism that enterprise bloatware like PeopleSoft (Microsoft *, Novell, FootPrints, Cadence, etc) will slowly but surely be replaced by modular programs that actually do a task, and do it well.
Now that we have a generation of automobile drivers that were born and grew up in a world with automobiles, I have plenty of optimism that traffic jams, drunk drivers, and general automobile idiocy will be replaced by conscientious drivers that actually obey traffic regulations and don't put themselves and other drives at undue risk.
Wait...
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
The world will be a better place when all the managers retire who were raised without computers.
But will get much much worse a short time later when managers who were raised on twitter take effect.
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.
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?