Univ. of Wisconsin's 30-Year-Old Payroll System Needs a $40 Million Fix 418
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."
That's a nice budget you got there (Score:3, Funny)
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Of course, as in any payroll system, it needs to be highly customized so a big chunk of costs will go to the consultant and professional services.
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so a big chunk of costs will go to the consultant
It will, and there's where they made the mistake. They purchased an Oracle product for big bucks and tried to get the lowest bidder to customize it. As a result, instead of spending small bucks they wasted big bucks. It would be humming along by now if they'd had Oracle send people to set it all up but that would have cost big bucks up front.
Re:That's a nice budget you got there (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:That's a nice budget you got there (Score:5, Funny)
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.
No problem. Just find some smart badgers. (Score:5, Funny)
That's nothing! I'll get the badgers to do the coding.
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Re:That's a nice budget you got there (Score:4, Insightful)
My response?? 'Sir
No
And a system that size I would never trust to the coders to test. You would need a decent sized QA team to run initial functional tests then increasingly more complex integration tests. And that is before you even get to the parallel test that will probably be required to run for at least a couple of months with data being feed from numerous system and out to other system which will also have to have testbeds setup.
Then having to deal with changing requirements while writing the system, since payroll changes won't just stop because it's going to take a year to design, write, and test it. Union contracts will be redone, new tax laws will come into play.
Sure
And a 3rd-year CS major would have no clue whatsoever since they have never spent years supporting such systems and don't know what the fuck they are talking about or how complex payroll really is.
Re:That's a nice budget you got there (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Bingo.
Conform to modern accounting and business practices, purchase COTS and you have solved not one problem but two.
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Offer $$$ though, and most if not all will take it.
At the last university I worked at in the UK, there where a small number of people that for historical reasons got paid in the middle of the month where everyone else was month end. A little application of $$$ in offering all those people a bonus to change to month ending, and you have a simplified payroll you only have to run once a month and everyone is happy.
There is at least $40 million here to ease the pain, plus the lower running costs. There is funda
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Re:That's a nice budget you got there (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:That's a nice budget you got there (Score:5, Insightful)
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Feature accretion (Score:5, Funny)
I love it when you talk dirty like that! Gimme some more, and say it in a hoarse whisper!
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You don't have to fully "re-engineer" it. It's a payroll system. You just implement a new one, check how much everyone's getting paid, and put that information in. Unless it has everyone on the planet it's not going to be that expensive.
Re:That's a nice budget you got there (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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not to mention INTERNAL company payroll needs
I bet you've identified the key problem right here. Instead of a set scale of pay grades I bet there is an maze of different salary and hourly rates that no one can figure out. 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.
Re:That's a nice budget you got there (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:That's a nice budget you got there (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:That's a nice budget you got there (Score:5, Insightful)
this is why we need to get rid of 99% of these fucking laws and live in a free society again
Re:That's a nice budget you got there (Score:5, Insightful)
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
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One little mistake could cost the organization millions
Too late it already HAS cost MILLIONS with no end in site...
It sounds like a death march program. A do over is in order. *MANY* people involved with this current fiasco need to be fired. It sounds like ego has run the day. With 'perfection' getting in the way of getting any sort of proper job done.
Im sorry there are MUCH MUCH MUCH MUCH larger organizations out there that have a system in place. You can *BUY* these sorts of systems for much less.
It
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Some companies do this, they'll spend $500k on the system, claim it works, turn it over and razzle dazzle the project manager who signs it, then pocket the remaining $35.5 million. Of course, they don't pocket the $35.5 million after they are done, they pocket it up front and all throughout the project, so that by the end they've spent their $40 million, and then some most likely.
Then when it doesn't work the company just points to the paper the PM signed and says "You said it worked just fine, we're not s
Re:That's a nice budget you got there (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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As a UW Student... (Score:5, Funny)
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As a citizen of the State of Wisconsin, I'm glad to see where my tax dollars are being wasted. Thanks Gov. Doyle and our dumba$$ lawmakers.
Bad Title (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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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.
That's exactly what they're doing. They are trying to switch to PeopleSoft.
Re:Bad Title (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
Re:Bad Title (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Bad Title (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Bad Title (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Bad Title (Score:5, Insightful)
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...
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Actually a generation of automobile drivers that were born and grew up in a world with automobiles are much better drivers then those who haven't. The rate of accidents are much higher in developing countries where most drivers are first generation drivers.
Ref: http://www.gwynnedyer.com/articles/Gwynne%20Dyer%20article_%20%20Smeed's%20Law.txt [gwynnedyer.com]
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Now that we have a generation of IT professionals that were born and grew up in a world with computers,
I dunno, that generation seems to be generally less knowledgeable about computers than those who grew up when computing was in its infancy. Do you think that the generation that grew up with mobile phones is more knowledgeable about radio frequency engineering and communication protocols? They might know how to send a text message, but it doesn't mean they understand anything about the underlying technology.
Re:Bad Title (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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no, people soft should NEVER be used. I've been at two universities which implemented it. both times were an unmitigated disaster and people including myself did not receive my paycheck for over a month. Peoplesoft and their engineers suck in every sense of the word and should NEVER be used.
Re:Bad Title (Score:5, Informative)
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Payroll isn't something companies should be specializing in managing. ADP/Paychex are kings in this arena for a reason.
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Oh, ffs (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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Being a graduate of Madcity, I can tell you that they produce some of the best programmers in the world.
"Guess what, ladies and gentlemen? This year's Comp Sci project is writing a payroll system..."
They could teach a 4 year Comp Sci program around it. Planning, implementation, support, and future growth.
Screw paying for it - utilize your existing resources!!!
Then again, with our current dumbf*ck Govenor... At least he's not going to make license plates like Illinois past governors...
Re:Oh, ffs (Score:5, Funny)
srlsy! Also, it was made in the 70's! How complex can a program on a handful of punch cards be?!
Re:Oh, ffs (Score:5, Informative)
Without really understanding the details of their payroll system and the task involved, I don't necessarily agree with your assessment. Most university IT groups don't have stellar project managers, which is the one thing that a project of this scale (and criticality) needs. Further, it's likely that nobody has have the expertise in either the outgoing payroll system or the one that's going to replace it (either in a shrinkwrap or roll-your-own configuration). I'm not sure whether or not hiring a high-paid, highly experienced and qualified project manager as an FTE is warranted. Further, what does an IT department do with a really good PM with tons of experience and a huge list of successful projects when this project ends in 18-24 months? The smart money is to eliminate the position, which is what a smart manager will see when they interview the university. Instead, they would likely work on a contract basis and (as you say) slice off 50% for themselves.
Rolling their own payroll system is also a possible disaster for them. It's very likely that they're having a hard time communicating requirements to professional payroll implementation/transition consultants who do this sort of thing all the time with a shrinkwrap ERP (like Oracle, SAP, etc). What makes you think that the university will be able to better communicate requirements to developers?
I guess that this is all armchair quarterbacking from both of us, since I have no idea of the circumstances beyond the details that the article provides (which are light, at best). It appears that this was mishandled on multiple levels though - likely both the fault of the university management and the consultants. Usually for projects to fail on this level, it has to go both ways - consultants mismanage a project, the university mismanages the consultants, and probably isn't able to clearly communicate requirements.
Re:Oh, ffs (Score:5, Interesting)
Yeah, I'm involved in a small gov't - and the cruft that accretes over time is incredible. We have nearly as many employee classifications as employees. (that means nearly every employee has his/her own job description and responsibilities and pay scale.)
We have union contracts. Several different ones, with different benefits. We have different health care benefits, retirement benefits, and so on. In some cases, we have a single employee who has a particular health plan and retirement plan, and they're grandfathered in, so we can't change them.
It's not just a matter of paying all the different taxes; it's that you have to understand all of the classifications, grandfather clauses, pay scales, benefits, and so on. I would guess that for UM, you multiply this by 10 or 20 and you see what you're dealing with.
The *only* way this can be done is to reclassify all your employees into some sort of structure that makes sense; this will invariably be shot down by the union as some members will see an erosion of benefits.
So most organizations will outsource this, blame it all on the consultant, take it to council/board of trustees/etc, and then run like hell from the fallout.
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Most university IT groups don't have stellar project managers, which is the one thing that a project of this scale (and criticality) needs.
This. Most universities pay their IT departments crap because they can get them so cheaply filled by students. Most students don't have a full academic education, and almost none have real world experience. The ones that do have the education and experience get higher paying jobs at private organizations. Having a university IT department manage a project of this magnitude is asking for trouble.
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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.
Never attribute to incompetence what can be explained by corruption. This is not "stupid", it's corruption working exactly as it's intended to. What's perhaps stupid is those ultimately footing the bill being too naive to realise it, and not holding the corrupt to account.
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why not just run a course on the old language then employ one of your graduates to maintain it?
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Outsource it along with the rest of HR (Score:2)
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It's disgusting. I agree, but not for the reasons you mention. Usually, it's just because the people at the top of a University have no clue about technical matters. To get to be a Regent for instance, you need good political skills, or you need to be rich, or you need to be part of a well-known, rich, and powerful family. Sadly, many crucial technical decisions that involve a ton of money get made around a large conference table, or they get made on som
This is a B-league project, A-leaguers avoid it (Score:5, Insightful)
100% spot on (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Outsourcing it (Score:2)
Now according to Wiki [wikipedia.org] 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?
Corruption (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
The money goes quickly on these projects (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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Ya. All that. Or they could have purchased an off-the-shelf system and adapted to that by conforming to modern business and accounting practices. And purchased custom data migration from India through a U.S. contractor cheaply.
Should we change the name? (Score:2, Funny)
just maybe...
we can call it "The Looney-versity of Wisconsin".
Would be appropriate.
Here's the real story (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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I'm not sure that your providing the full story but from what I have heard regarding the project is that there were two problems:
1. Opposition and lack of adoption by employees.
2. Arrogance and irresponsible behavior (ie politial and monetary) on the part of many involved with the project.
The problem has been a matter of technology but people acting out of negligence and greed. It is hurting UW-Madison in more areas than this project.
UW needs to fix its retention problem, reign in it's spending on build
Well here's your problem (Score:2, Funny)
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's conversion (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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PeopleSoft is the devil's anus boil... every conversion I've seen to PS has been a loss in money, efficiency, and control.
But their sales force is top notch in convincing upper management (you know, those folks who will never actually have to use it) that they're going to go out of business with out it.
Efficiency (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
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Re:Efficiency (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
I just want to know (Score:3, Insightful)
Who were fired?
A university has lots of unpaid laborers (Score:5, Funny)
And if it doesn't work, you give them all 'F's and start again with the next incoming class.
The University of Vermont went through this (Score:5, Informative)
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 $40 mil or so.
http://www.vermontnewsguy.com/tag/daniel-fogel/ [vermontnewsguy.com]
Bottom line is that these type of projects are incredibly complex and no one really knows the long term costs when they get into it initially. But due diligence and oversight would be critical and helpful no doubt.
Par for Course for Peoplesoft Migrations (Score:3, Insightful)
Data migration from the old mainframe systems always turns into a nightmare, cost overruns are legion, political pressure to meet deadlines causes internal staff to rack up huge overtime at huge cost, Oracle licensing runs well into 7 figure territory, etc, etc
This money was gone the second they selected a Peoplesoft "solution", management just didn't know it at the time
I bet a group of students can fix it in 4 Months (Score:3, Interesting)
I bet a group of enthusiatic CS/IT students with programming skills and maybe one teacher with real life experience can build and/or fix this in 4 months. Give them the tools, have them prepare by giving them access to all personell doing payroll stuff and familiar with the process of payroll and pay them a good salary plus a bonus if they finish it before next winter-semester is over. Give them option to do their thesis or degree paper on the project. Add in a few law students if complicated German-style tax stuff is involved for some extra interdisciplinary flavour and results.
Voila! Top-of-the-line payroll system for something like 100 000$. ... 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.
Before you bet... (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:What is so special about this university? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:What is so special about this university? (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
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If it is a typical complex, highly-customized business system, it will have:
So, I'd say your Phase 1 above is a vast under-estimation. And the idea that you can farm it out to an external
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I'd simply mod you up if I could, but I can't so, I'll comment instead.
Speaking from extensive experience in data integration and migration from legacy (no, I really mean ancient) systems, this really is just a simplified version of what really happens in successful projects of this scope. Having also seen the nightmare scenario that UW is going through, I can guarantee that the failure lies in a lack of project management. With a budget that large, it didn't even require good project management. All th
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Their a university, they could just start teaching cobal again!
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1. Find out what other Big Ten universities have implemented, pick the best and use that one.
2. Run away from Accenture. If they rip off everyone they work with, who do they use for references for the next job?
Managers often have profound ignorance. (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Managers often have profound ignorance. (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Some kids are profoundly ignorant. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Here's the deal:
Most Canadians would rather not get stuck in some American hospital bankrupting themselves for survival. So most of us don't go to the US for care.
The thing about Waiting Lists is that because we have regular contact with our doctors (free contact) we can identify issues early on. It's called Preventative Medicine, rather than addressing problems after they happen, we identify them before they start. It sucks
Paymaster open source payroll software (Score:2)
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First, it's not really $40m, it's only $40m b/c they're doing it 2x. It's closer to $20m.
And...it's not just upgrading, as pointed out. It's a complete new system. Any system as old as their previous system is probably in need of replacement rather than simply refactoring and basic updating.
I just did some back of the envelope calculations. So...outside firm bids. Let's say that we'll have 24 minions (basic programmers, project management, requirements, documentation, etc). We'll say they average $70k
Re:FRIST!!!! (Score:4, Funny)
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?
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Re:FRIST!!!! (Score:4, Insightful)
I am a software architect and ex comp sci. lecturer.
I guarantee you are being exceptionally naive.
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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.
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Why?
Probably hard to find parts for whatever vintage 1975 mainframe it runs on. If you only know PC's, imagine trying to buy a brand new VESA bus SCSI card for your legacy 486 mission critical system.