Factors Responsible For The Failure Of The Queensland Health Payroll System

Background of Queensland Health Payroll System

In 2010, the Queensland Health had initiated to improvise the existing health payroll system in two phases. The main objective of this project was to implement the new payroll system by replacing ESP Kronos system and LATTICE payroll system (Duffield  and Whitty  2015).  In the newly improvised system the government organizations will access the state wise centralized shared information. The responsibility of managing the project was on CropTech and IBM Australia was selected for the contractor for the delivery.

The outcome of the project was a failure. There are various factors those were responsible for the failure of the project. The failure was affected the payment of 76,000 employees (Sullivan et al.2016). Various firms and organizations put n their view about the failure of the project. The overall conclusion detects that the unclear objective of the project, over budget and the lack of proper management were the responsible factors for the failure of the project. The main objective of this paper is to evaluate the different factors that had significant aspects in the project and the factors those were responsible for the failure of the project. The conclusion is drawn on the basis of the justification and the take away from the discussion.

Shared service initiative was formed by Queensland government in 2002. The main purpose of this objective is to synchronize the access of the data across the various departments of the government. The improvisation of the standard of the corporate service along with reducing the overhead cost was the main objective of the project. In order to achieve these objectives the centralization of the IT management and the operations and simplification of the business process had been indulged. CropTech of the Queensland Treasury was made responsible for the managing of the project and in 2007 IBM Australia was made the delivery manager of the project. The Queensland health payroll system has 15 payroll systems of 13 different government departments. The system manages the payroll of 76,000 employees. LATTICE and ESP Kronos were used as the prime component in the system.

However, in 2010, the improvisation of the existing system was proposed as the components used in the existing system were out of date. Instead if LATTICE and ESP Kronos   the use of SAP and Workbrain was proposed.  However, this improvisation of the existing system was not successful and certain factors were responsible for the failure of the project.

Components of Queensland Health Payroll System

The main components in the system are SAP and Workbrain.

SAP: For the processing of the payroll system SAP HR was used. The functionality of SAP CATS is used for the processing of the data. Other information used in the payroll system for the processing of the information is attendance data, fixed allowances, taxation and reporting of the payroll.

Workbrain:  The main function of thee workbrain is to interface the data into the SAP. These data are related to allowances which are related to the time, penalties and data regarding overtime. The main function of workbrain is to configure and process all the time and condition related data. The rules generally implemented through configuration.

The implementation of SABA and ASP has done in order to integrate the existing system into SAP. These lists are-

• Management of the assets and finance.
• Decision Support System
• HR System.

There are certain issues and the problems those were responsible for certain impacts on the renovation of the existing system. Some of these factors are-

• Complexity of the project: The overall payroll system in the Queensland Health payroll system is complex. There are lots of acts related to the different industrial areas were needed to be considered during the implementation of the project. Each of the acts has different rules and regulations. The application of different types of rules and regulations for different sectors has to be implemented in the system. This increases the complexity of the project. The combination of the pay needed to be created in 24,000 formats (Chiu,  Chen and Zhu 2017). Apart from that 1010 payroll staffs were needed to fill up the form in fortnight for the renovation of the existing system. The technical experts’ state that the implementation of different pay rules increases the complexity of the project.
• Short time frame:The duration for the delivery of the product is short. Apart from that 1010 numbers of employees were needed to fill up the form for providing the information for the modification of the existing system. The whole process was completed within the fortnight. The time duration was very short in this case (Humphreys et al. 2017). Apart from that the delivery of the live system had to be done within 8 months which was very short period of time as the previous system was implemented in 6 years.

The above issues have significance in the delivery of the project. It can be said that the absence the proper management for handling these problem caused the failure of the project.

The modification of the existing system of the Queensland Health payroll system failed to deliver the expected outcome. There are certain factors which indicate sthe failure of the project. These factors are-

The cost of the project: The cost of the development of the project was exceeded three times than the estimated project budget. The change in the budget happens due to the scope creep in the project. The change in the requirements had been notices 47 times during the development of the project. This took the budget for the compilation of the project four times than estimated budget.

The consequences of the project: The consequences of the project affected 75,000 employees who were in the payroll system. This happens due to the delay in the delivery of the project.

Delay in the delivery of the project:  The delivery of the project was 18 months late, which was not desirable. The delivery of the project in each fortnight was highly manual. The manual system needed 130 manual work-arounds and management of the retrospective payments and double handling of the pay forms (Mustofa  2016). All these processes increase the overhead of the project. The consequences of these factors results-

• $1.01 billion spent for the actual business modification.
• $220.5 million was spent for the fixing of the retrospective problems and the corrections.
• $25 million was spent for deciding the future modification of the system.

The problems those were identified in the existing system are-

• Payment based on the incorrect system.
• Missing functionality
• The synchronization between the SAP and workbrain failed.
• Errors in the data.

The two most important problems identified in this context are payment based on the incorrect system and lack of synchronization between SAP and Workbrain.

Factors contributing to the failure of the project

The payment based on the incorrect system had affected many employees who are under this health payroll system. The merging of the Workbrain and SAP had failed. The data transformation regarding the payroll from SAP to Workbrain took long time. The “Multi Viewer Schedular” of workbrain crashed several times , affecting the entire system (Herniter and Maasberg 2018). Apart from that based on the wrong system , there were approximately 20,000 forms those were not processed and the information regarding those forms were not migrated to SAP. This affected the leave balance of 5,700 employees in the health payroll system.

There are several problems present in the implementation of the Queensland Health Payroll System. However, the mitigation of the consequences of these two problems will improvise the payroll system. The proper synchronization between the SAP and the Workbrain will help the transformation of the data in a proper way (Raza 2018). On the other hand the proper implementation of the system will help the better management off the employee data in the payroll system. This will help to mitigate the manual processing in the system. On the other hand the employees will not have to adjust the leave balance manually in order to fetch the right data.

In order to resolve the problem the following section can be needed to be considered. Some of the identified fields of the problems are-

• The management and the governance of the project.
• The requirements of the project.
• The quality of the data.
• The development maintaining of the life cycle of the project.
• Managing the scope of the project.

The main problem with the development of the Queensland Health Payroll system was that the scope of the project was not understood in a proper way (Philip 2015). This led to the scope creep in the development to the project. The requirements of the project have been changed for 47 times. This led to the over flowing of the estimated budget (Asgarkhani et al. 2017). Apart from that the objective of the project was not clear initially. In order to compile the project successfully, the objective of the project would be clear. Apart from that there should be clarity in the requirement of the project.

Queensland Health payroll system had suffered from the lack of governance of the development of the project. The conflict over the governance regarding the development of the project had been experienced (Wilkin et al. 2015). The conflict was between the IBM , the coordinator of the project and Queensland Health payroll. Assigning the roles to the specific teams members in the project team is needed to be done in a proper so that all the stakeholders are aware about their roles in the project.

Problems identified in the Queensland Health Payroll System

The quality of thee data is dependent on the data fetching system of the whole process. There is no synchronization between the SAP and Workbrain. This led to the manual adjustment of the data. This led to the degradation of the quality of the data. The proper synchronization between SAP and Workbrain would mitigate the data synchronization problem.

The following of the stages of life cycle in a proper way is another factor for the improvisation of the project. The selection of the methodology is important for this stage. The Queensland Health payroll system should follow the agile methodology for the development of the project. However, it has been seen that the proper project management planning has not been taken in this case (Eden and Sedera 2014). In case, if proper project management planning is done and the selection of the methodology has been implemented in a proper way, the managing of the project can be effective and the project can deliver the right outcome.

Some of the recommendations can be made for the improvisation of thee whole system.

Use of proven integrated framework:

The interface between the SAP and workbrain is not proper. In this case, the use of proper framework can be done.

Application integration framework:

The application framework can be helpful for development of the service oriented architecture. The service oriented framework will be helpful for the application of the  terms and conditions for the evaluation of the payment for the employees in a proper way. In this case. SAP NetWeaver and message oriented middle ware can be used.

Use of cloud architecture for the storage of the data:

The information needed for the Queensland Health payroll system is in the large amount. It holds the data regarding each employee enrolled in then payroll system. In order to implement the effective storage of the data the cloud storage can be used (Schefe 2016). The cloud storage will enable the storage of the large amount of data. Apart from that the overhead cost of the infrastructure can be mitigated and the security of the data can be maintained properly.

Conclusion

The discussion is regarding the Queensland Health payroll system. In this paper the different factors responsible for the failure of the project has been discussed. In this context it has been identified that the lack of the scope and mismanagement of the budget and the time are the major factors for the failure of the project. Certain recommendations and justifications have been provided for the improvisation of the system. In order to do that the identification of the issues has been done in the improvised health payroll system. It can be said from the discussion that implementation of the certain project management plan and proper governance can be useful for the project to deliver the right outcome.

Reference

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