13 March 2006

"Complete Human Resource Information System 21" - Has some problems

| johnboy
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The Canberra Times is reporting on the vast numbers of ACT public servants who will be needed to manually sort out the payroll issues surrounding the implementation of a whizz bang IT system.

Katy Gallagher is once again not responsible.

Ms Gallagher said questions about the contract would be more appropriately handled by the Chief Minster, Jon Stanhope, as the contract was across the ACT Public Service.

Anyone want to bet a badly specified contract was awarded, by people with little technical knowledge, on the basis of who provided the nicest lunch?

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advice on leave for the affected is to refer to a payslip from last June. I assume the Assembly is busy ratifying the death penalty so that someone can be suitable rewarded for their outstanding achievement.

Its not a good day to work in IT and be a Chris :s

As ever, they probably contracted the lowest bidder. bonfires’ contract variation anecdote is the rule more often than the exception. It’s too depressing, can someone pick a fight on a tangent please, get me off this track?

Hm, maybe the public service medal should come with a self-destruct capacity – if a stuff-up is revealed after you got your medal, it blows up.

This system has been heading for a fall for 2 years. It shows what you can get when you have generalist senior managers who really don’t have a clue about the ins and outs of implementing such a system. you would have thought that the experience of some of the large fed depts would have given them a clue or 2 though. farce!

Incidentally, in response to bonfire’s comment, CHRIS is actually considered an off-the-shelf solution in the payroll world. Unfortunately, every reasonably large organisation’s payroll requirements are different so it’s practically impossible to get something that’s going to satisfy them in shrinkwrapped form. This is compounded by the fact that it’s not usually possible to change payroll rules (i.e. Collective Agreements) to fit the way the system works as delivered – hence it needs to be vice versa. You have the choice of buying something like CHRIS and modifying it to suit your needs, or building your own system from the ground up – an option which seems to be much less in vogue than used to be the case.
Of course, I’ve always been a big believer in the flexibility offered by Microsoft Excel 🙂

I had heard (not from an authoritative source, mind you) that the problem with the pays a few fortnights ago was related to a problem in the bank’s software, not CHRIS’s. I’m interested to know whether anyone can definitively say whether this is the case or not. I’ve certainly seen it happen many times in the past where a dodgy system cops the blame for anything and everything that goes wrong in the near vicinity.

We all know, several pays ago now, that CHRIS21 shat itself and approximately 1/2 the people who receive ACT Govt paychecks got paid.

It totally screwed up direct debits for home loans etc. At the Dept of Ed, the payroll phones were engaged for hours and apparently (through a friend who is a nurse) the same was said of the Canberra Hospital payroll phones.

The old system was a hell of a lot better. Whoever got that medal for bringing in CHRIS21 should be shot.

Chances are the contract was specified by a committee of about 50 and tried to be all things to everyone and has failed miserably at being any good for anyone. That, or Chief Minister’s Dept just decided they knew best and decreed this is what everyone is going to do.

ive seen several examples of what id call software stovepipes.

in all instances orgs would have been better off walking away and purchasing ‘off the shelf’ solutions.

i went through a file adding up ‘contract variations’ on a particular software solution.

totalled half a mil.

they could have procured commrcial off the shelf for 120K.

because larger scale projects can run over several years often the fuckups arent seen until the original team have moved or been moved on.

Absent Diane4:43 pm 13 Mar 06

I have heard friends who work in local gov complain….. a lot about it… having to ring up personel to see what leave they have etc…. they also say that the system would be easy to rort….

Slight glitches in rollout are understandable but the old computerised system being switched off at the end of the financial year and nothing computerised since is a bit more than a glitch. I call it a major fuck up. NOBODY in the ACT government knows how much leave they have at present.

Pay peanuts, end up with monkeys. You’d be surprised how much manual intervention is required in these automated systems.

Someone always misses some icon or a file copy to some server or what have you. You need to be fastidious on the details.

Meh. Speaking as someone who implements these sorts of systems for a living (not CHRIS, but one of its competitors) I have never seen anybody get a decent sized rollout right. Which system is chosen is generally pretty irrelevant, it’s the people running the projects that seem to make the same mistakes over and over again. Same shit, different department/company…

I especially like the fact that the individual responsible for the rollout/implementation of this new system received the public service medal for her brilliance.

You couldn’t be more wrong JB, you simpleton. I would suggest keeping your forked toungue behind your teeth until later on in the day
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HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHhahhahahahhahhaaha! *choke* Hahahahahahhaha! My wife used to work with one of these people. She laughed this morning on reading this in the paper. He’s muscle bound yes, but not the sharpest tool in the shed. Let’s just say Mrs Justbands was not shocked at all to see this had gone badly.

Oh i see,

So it was a model of competence which arsed it up was it?

You couldn’t be more wrong JB, you simpleton. I would suggest keeping your forked toungue behind your teeth until later on in the day.

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