Australian State Bans IBM From All Contracts After Payroll Bungle

renai42 writes "If you don't follow Australian technology news, you're probably not aware that over the past few years, the State of Queensland massively bungled a payroll systems upgrade in its Department of Health. The issues resulted in thousands of hospital staff being underpaid or not paid at all, and has ballooned in cost from under $10 million in budget to a projected total cost of $1.2 billion. Queensland has now banned the project's prime contractor, IBM, comprehensively from signing any new contracts with any government department, until it addresses what the state says are IBM's project governance issues."

Comments

Lol

[Anonymous Coward]

Deflection, Qld health are the worst run bureaucracy in country. I've heard first hand they put non IT on the project and were forever changing scope then pushing forward with little or no testing.

Re: Lol

[Anonymous Coward]

Ditto. I know one of the IBM Admins for this job, she said Qld health signed off at every stage before going live. I'd like to see who has the greater budget for a court battle - the qld govt is broke.

Re:Lol

[Anonymous Coward]

I worked on a large project for a quasi-government body building software for Queensland Health as a customer.

They had reservations about us being able to deliver. We delivered a rock-solid piece of software on time and budget. They, however, took 8 _years_ to take that piece of software and put it into production.

Yes, they are that bad.

They were a basketcase _at least_ a decade before the payroll bungle.

Re:Lol

[RabidReindeer]

Indeed. IBM's reputation is pretty well established. They are slow, tedious and yet effective. They are a glacier in IT. But I see it everywhere -- people making decisions in an IT project that have know knowledge of what it takes to make things happen. The illusion that "it's all so easy" has really gotten buried too deep in someone's head somewhere.

The magic phrase is "All You Have To Do Is..."

Those six words have destroyed more IT projects than anyone can count.

Queensland Health Payroll were a joke already

[Anonymous Coward]

My wife is a doctor who works for Queensland health. To be honest, they had comprehensively mucked up her payroll numerous times prior to the IBM System. Unfortunately, they now feel the need to deduct her pay based on shifts she did 4 years ago (as the new system has slightly different data than the old one). The staff of QH are basically comprehensively useless, and even prior to the new system they would do things like email her other people's personal details and salary information. The staff always have been lazy and careless, and the new system couldn't handle users that didn't give a shit about doing a good job. IBM has undoubtedly ballsed things up, but QH Payroll are genuinely amongst the least competent people in the world. In fact, pretty much anyone in a government position in Queensland is useless, which is why they are in the process of firing 16,000 of them...

Re:Australia could have learned from New Zealand

[LordLucless]

Geography lesson: New Zealand is NOT a state of Australia.

However, we've got provision for you in our constitution, just waiting :P

6..."The States" shall mean such of the colonies of New South Wales, New Zealand, Queensland, Tasmania, Victoria, Western Australia, and South Australi

Re:Project governance issues

[maroberts]

Hmm, about that successful Docklands Light Railway

While the first five years were plagued by unreliability and operational problems,[55] the system has now become highly reliable.[55] In 2008, 87% of the population of North Woolwich were in favour of the DLR

i.e. it took five years to fix the issues with it.
It's also overcrowded and the level of demand was grossly underestimated.