Management of IT Systems and Projects-

Assignment - "Queensland Health Payroll System Project Plan"

The Queensland Health Payroll System

References:

• ABC Report 'Qld Health payroll debacle to cost $1.2b', Matt Wordswoth, 7/6/12
• Report from the Commissioner, Richard Chesterman, Queensland Health Payroll System Commission of Inquiry, 31/7/13
• Report to Parliament, Information systems governance and control, including the Queensland Health Implementation of Continuity Project, Auditor-General of Queensland, 6/2010
• KPMG Queensland Health Payroll Implementation Review, Stage 1 Status Report, 8/5/10 and Stage II, 18/5/10

To quote the Commissioner, Richard Chesterman: "(The Queensland Health Payroll System) failure, attended by enormous cost, damage to government and impact on workforce, may be the most spectacular example of all the unsuccessful attempts to impose a uniform solution on a highly complicated and individualized agency."

Summary Background

In 2002, the Queensland Government embarked on a Shared Services Initiative to amalgamate and rationalize services across departments and agencies. This follows the successful shared services model of large US corporations in the 1980s and subsequent implementation of ERP systems.

CorpTech, a technology centre in Queensland Treasury was setup to implement a Shared Services Solutions Program and initiated a project to build a whole of government HR and Finance solution with a capital budget of $125M. Payroll and rostering was chosen as the first initiatives and SAP EEC5 (for payroll) and Workbrain (for rostering) were selected.

Queensland Health Payroll had been using a legacy system called LATTICE, which was no longer going to be supported from 30/6/08, and could not accommodate the complexities of a new enterprise bargain agreement. In 12/07 IBM was awarded a contract to replace Queensland Health Payroll and LATTICE. IBM required $181M and the system went live in 3/10.

Several years later, 1,000 employees are required to process data, the 8 years system life cost is estimated to be over $1.2B, and employees are still being over and under paid!

Your Assignment

You are a team of consultants working for IBM in early 2007. You have been involved in the Queensland Government's Shared Services Initiative, and you know the team at CorpTech very well. You successfully won the contract to supply and implement Workbrain. You are happy to work with SAP and numerous other contractors to possibly implement both SAP EEC5 and Workbrain.

Your boss, Mr. Bigshot, has asked you to provide a high level project plan, to assist IBM with their tender submission. Mr. Bigshot wants to be assured of the following:

1. IBM understands the project's background and context. What are the pain points? Where are the opportunities for cost reduction and improved service delivery? What are the benchmark standards and reference points? Governments are meant to provide leadership and engage in innovation to better utilize public resources and provide enhanced services. The aim is to deploy information technology to be able to do more with less.

2. The scope of the project can be broken down into components and success metrics can be developed for each component. We want to know what success looks like, and be able to manage success through quantifiable metrics. The project must have a strong business case. Mr. Bigshot believes in a win-win scenario for both IBM and Queensland Health.

3. This is a complex project. However, the technology and algorithms are very standard and IBM themselves have a similar worldwide ERP system to handle HR, rostering and payroll. Thousands of IBM's clients successfully use SAP solutions. This is not rocket science! However, in this instance, there is considerable complexity. Hence, it is vital to break the project down into components, iteratively develop these components, and incrementally deliver. Stage gates involving prototypes, trials and test sites are essential. A comprehensive project process model needs to identify this iterative process.

4. Dealing with so many stakeholders and so much business rule complexity creates additional risks. There are the usual technology risks, but we at IBM are skillful and we are confident about our proposed solutions (SAP and Workbrain). However, we need to understand the specific contextual risks, develop a comprehensive risk register, quantify the risks on a scale from trivial to catastrophic and develop mitigation strategies for all significant risks. If we cannot mitigate all significant risks, then of course, we cannot proceed to tender for this project! Based on this report, what are the recommendations of the project team?

This assignment requires you to go back in time to early 2007. IBM knows a lot about the project and stakeholders. IBM believes it can deliver a successful solution. YOU have an enormous amount of information that can help to inform you on the context for the new payroll and rostering system, its expected business benefits, its components etc. However, now you have the chance to rethink the project process model. You can accurately identify the potential risks (as most of them actually eventuated) and devise strategies to mitigate them. You have 20/20 hindsight vision. I hope you enjoy this assignment.