[GTALUG] better than average article on why the federal payroll system is a mess

[Christopher Browne]

On 12 August 2016 at 11:13, D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk <talk at gtalug.org> wrote:
> There have been a bunch of headlines about the new federal payroll
> system "Phoenix" is screwing up a lot.  This article does a reasonable
> job of describing how the problems happened.
>
> <http://www.itworldcanada.com/blog/phoenix-payroll-report-by-michael-wernick-the-clerk-of-the-privy-council/385370>

I love the bits of recommendations to the PM in wee italicized
quips...  Particularly the "I recommend you not acknowledge the
existence of this problem."

The notion of there being varying interpretations of employment
contracts in different locations is... interesting...

I don't envy them the problems; payroll is a tougher problem than it
seems, and transitioning to a new system is a mighty difficult task.
Been there, lost some hair to it (I worked on the transitions for
American Airlines and Sabre).

With 300,000 civil servants spread across the country, and hence
numerous legal jurisdictions (10 provinces, 3 territories, plus
diplomatic staff residing elsewhere), and some fairly large number of
unions and hence labour contracts, there's a LOT of complexity.  If
they're imagining they'll cut from 2400 payroll staff to 600-ish, then
a lot of the resulting rules need to be encoded in
software/configuration and validated, which is pretty daunting.

Anyone that has in their head that they "just" need to configure
several copies of QuickBooks Payroll, I suggest you smack your head
against a wall sufficiently vigorously to thoroughly knock such
thoughts out...
-- 
When confronted by a difficult problem, solve it by reducing it to the
question, "How would the Lone Ranger handle this?"