The Techies weigh in!
Why shouldn't they? ...they're the ones who'll have to fix it.
Posted to ZDNET: Tech News, Blogs and White Papers for IT Professionals by Michael Krigsman | http://blogs.zdnet.com/projectfailures/?p=436
The obvious human toll has contributed to increased tension between the union and school district. Malcolm Woodfield, who runs SAP’s higher education business unit on a global basis, told me, “It’s impossible to avoid taking this personally. I live in
Given the severity of the situation, this blog post proposes a turnaround strategy for the project. According to Forrester Research, the first step toward turning around a troubled project is to conduct a project “reset”. This involves three key components:
- Communicating candidly to stakeholders
- Buying time to plan
- Defining the root cause of failure, and aligning the team to solve it
COMMUNICATING CANDIDLY TO STAKEHOLDERS
I believe the district should immediately and publicly take full ownership and responsibility for the problem. Superintendent David Brewer, I’m afraid this means you.
The LA Times raised questions regarding Superintendent Brewer’s leadership:
Touted as an outsider who could tame the district bureaucracy, Brewer missed an opportunity to demonstrate his leadership abilities with his early handling of a poorly functioning new payroll system. To some, Brewer did not quickly grasp the scope of the problem, which has resulted in overpayment or underpayment to tens of thousands of teachers and other employees.
Dude, it’s time to become directly and personally involved, or the problem will not get solved anytime soon. I’m sure you’ve delegated to top management, but that strategy hasn’t worked, and it’s time for a change.
Why hasn’t the district found a better way to assist the teachers? Superintendent Brewer, I urge you to waste no time in setting aside some small part of your $7.5 billion budget for this purpose. If you think your current efforts are sufficient, perhaps call the union to ask their opinion.
BUYING TIME TO PLAN
With tensions running high, there’s great pressure to solve the problem quickly. However, the situation was not created overnight, and planning is needed to fix it properly. Last thing you need is a quick fix that ends up making matters worse.
If the district does a better job helping affected teachers, maybe the union will give the administration some breathing room. I suggest the union tone down its rhetoric right now to help lower tensions. This might be a good time for the union head to meet with Superintendent Brewer, to discuss their shared payroll problem.
Regardless of the obstacles and complexity, taking time to develop a strategic analysis and plan is absolutely essential right now. Thorough and complete project management is the answer.
DEFINING THE ROOT CAUSE OF FAILURE, AND ALIGNING THE TEAM TO SOLVE IT
The direct causes of the payroll failure must be understood in order to fix the problem. I haven’t seen details explaining why the paychecks are wrong, so can only speculate on possible factors:
University payroll is inherently complex. Aside from the usual procedural and administrative issues, schools must deal with concurrent employment, which is described in an SAP brochure:
The most important concepts are as follows:
· Each employee can have multiple personnel assignments.
· A permanent record of personal information, including the person’s name and address, is kept independent of the individual assignments.
· Each personnel assignment is linked to the person.
· A personnel assignment describes the work that the person needs to do, when the work is to be done, and how that work is to be paid, among other characteristics.
Some commentators have suggested that SAP software offers weak support for concurrent employment, which therefore caused the problems. To check this assertion, I spoke with Malcolm Woodfield, SAP’s higher education executive, who said:
Concurrent employment is complicated, but it’s a non-issue technically for SAP. We’ve worked closely with specialized user groups, such as the ASUG K-12 community, which has specific requirements in this area, and our concurrent employment works well.
Given SAP’s experience in the market, it’s simply not credible to assert the problems are due to technical limitations in the SAP software. Disagree if you like, but that’s my considered opinion.
Roll out and testing were likely flawed. I spoke with Marla Eby, Director of Communications for the union, who commented:
Teacher payroll is complex, however, the old system did work. The system was rolled out too quickly, and without sufficient testing. The union requested that the system be run in parallel prior to full roll out, to ensure these problems would not occur. The school district chose not to follow this advice for budget reasons, which is ironic given all the cost overruns now.
The union work rules may be overly-complicated. Although payroll system changes are often accompanied by pain and discomfort, this situation is extreme. The LAUSD has a current budget of $7.5 billion, which puts the district firmly in the middle of the Fortune 500, based on revenues. One wonders about the work rules that must exist in such a large school system.
I wonder whether specific jobs, payroll, and scheduling rules may be self-contradictory, yielding different results depending on the method of calculation. If so, then the union and administration must work together to simplify the rules. ERP implementations are intended to expose how an organization operates, which helps streamline and standardize processes. Sometimes, however, the business transformation effort highlights complicated and inefficient processes that may have evolved over decades. If that’s a factor here, then district and union leadership face a major, business-oriented simplification challenge that has little to do with software.
I suspect Deloitte has pussy-footed the issue, to avoid pissing off this big client. Deloitte, you’re paid handsomely to get this stuff done and you are now failing. If the LAUSD isn’t supplying information needed to fully configure and test the system (which I strongly suspect is part of the problem), then take stronger steps. If your paychecks were on the line, you’d call the president of the
SAP hasn’t taken a sufficiently proactive role. Although SAP supplied the software, this is a Deloitte project, meaning SAP has had limited involvement to date. [Note: If you don’t work in the enterprise software business, this arrangement probably makes little sense, but there are historical reasons for it. In the future, I’ll write a blog post explaining the issue in more detail.]
SAP, although you haven’t been directly involved on this project, something has gone very wrong and you’re the ultimate experts. It’s high time you crossed some boundaries and pushed Deloitte harder.
- [Thanks to Mike Prosceno, SAP’s Vice President of Communications, for arranging and and facilitating the interview with Malcolm Woodfield.]
Michael Krigsman is CEO of Asuret, Inc., a software and consulting company dedicated to reducing software implementation failures. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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