Please read carefully the following text¹ which describes concisely some of the major factors contributing to the failure of a Queensland Government ISD project. You then need to answer the questions that immediately follow the text. Your answers should be recorded within the ISD worksheet of the BISM&Assign& 2020&Sem&1.xlsx file. Your answers should be concise and address the major points given in this specification.

Queenslands Health Payroll System

The implementation of Queensland Healths Payroll system will almost certainly be remembered as one of the most disastrous IT projects in our countrys history. What began as a $6.19 million contract between the State of Queensland and IBM Australia to replace Queensland Healths aging payroll system eventually produced many thousands of payroll anomalies (underpayments, overpayments, nonP payments), and an estimated cost to Queensland taxpayers of $1.25 billion. The implementation was delivered by a Waterfall project methodology. Please read the overview information below, and then answer the questions that follow the overview description.

The Queensland Treasury had attempted unsuccessfully to implement a standardised SAPPbased HR system across the whole of Queensland government operations during 2005/2006. A former program director of CorpTech (the specialised business unit of the Queensland Treasury) had noted that the departments within the state were still debating and arguing about what they would or would not get and what they would and would not accept. The delays suffered during the wider state rollout of the SAPPbased system had already highlighted that the various government departments within the state, including Queensland Health, could not agree upon the internal requirements for a governmentPwide system.

The problems encountered by this governmentPwide project impacted very heavily upon Queensland Health. This department was originally scheduled to receive the new SAPPbased HR system in 2006 and was still using a decadePold LATTICE payroll system for its HR processing. With the supplier ending support for the LATTICE payroll system in July 2008, a decision was made in late 2007 by Queensland Health and CorpTech to commence the design and implementation of a new Queensland Health payroll system. The Queensland Health payroll project was awarded to IBM in December of 2007, with CorpTech entrusted with overall project management. The contract price negotiated for the design and implementation of the new payroll system was $6.19 million. The system was to be delivered in July of 2008 P the same month that the support for the existing LATTICE payroll system was scheduled to expire.

This meant that Queensland Health, CorpTech and IBM had agreed to a seven month timeframe to deliver a payroll system with complex award structures that spanned 13 awards and multiple industrial agreements, and contained in excess of 24,000 different combinations of pay for 80,000 employees.

According to the original project documentation, a timeframe of only two weeks was allocated to determine the business requirements and solution scope of the complex payroll project. It should be noted that a similar payroll project took 12 months to scope and three years to rollout at the privately run Mater hospital. The Mater project had finished on time and on budget.

The Queensland Health project soon started to struggle under the weight of changing requirements (or scope creep), with a recorded 47 submitted change requests signed off by CorpTech in a space of just two months after the contracts were signed. As a result of the poorlyPdefined business requirements, uncertainty quickly developed as to what exactly the project was required to deliver. The project scope remained openPended throughout the life of the project. The designed system then failed critical user acceptance testing (UAT) but instead of correcting all identified problems, the testing standards were

lowered and less rigorous guidelines adopted in an effort to get the system delivered to users as soon as possible.

The system finally went live in March of 2010, 20 months after the original start date, and the project bill had already ballooned to $101 million. The project documentation also reveals that prior to the payroll system going live the project underwent four revised go live dates and four separate stages of change requests, often done at the last minute. The delayed establishment of a mutually agreed baseline scope impacted every aspect of the project including the implementation and testing phases. The net result was that a flawed system went live. The system left thousands of Queensland Health employees underpaid, overpaid or not paid at all. As at 2013, the system had produced more than 35,000 payroll anomalies and had cost the state in excess of $400 million in extraordinary operational costs. An international accounting firm estimated in 2013 that the cost of making the system function for the next five years would be another $836 million.

Please answer the following questions. You must base your answers on the material covered in our three weeks of ISD coverage. Consequently there is no need to reference your answers. Please note that all the following questions require you to use basic analysis of the text above with reference to our teaching content. Your answers should be concise and not exceed 600 words. There is absolutely no need for verbose responses. This is the communication style of a good analyst concise, relevant, and accurate.

Your completed report should be included as a single document with your answers to part A (BPMN) then saved as a PDF document for submission.

We shall provide further advice closer to the assignment submission date in terms of how your submission file must be named.

Q1. There are three fundamental problems that occurred during the development project? Concisely explain each of these problems. Please ensure you discuss only three problems. (2%)

Q2. We have considered the flow of a Waterfall project as linear and sequential. Explain concisely what this means. Explain how the project description above clearly confirms that the Health Department project flow did not remain linear and sequential.