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