"The project was meant to save costs by firing 1,200 employees handling payroll at various departments around the country and replacing them with about 500 people in a centralized location using Phoenix to handle most of the government’s payroll needs."
It's not software problems, or not primarily software problems anyway. They fired EVERYONE who knew anything about payroll in the entire Canadian government, all at once, and hired 500 brand new people in one call center to work with the brand new software as it rolled out. The new software doesn't include code for a lot of "special cases" which together represent a lot of cases. The new people have no idea how to solve most pay problems (people problems OR software problems). They get four days of training.
"Phoenix was supposed to cut our work in half. It actually doubled our work. So, you can't get rid of 2,000 people ... and double the work and expect the work to get done," one said."
Overall, even if the software worked perfectly the execution would have been a disaster.
"The project was meant to save costs by firing 1,200 employees handling payroll at various departments around the country and replacing them with about 500 people in a centralized location using Phoenix to handle most of the government’s payroll needs."
It's not software problems, or not primarily software problems anyway. They fired EVERYONE who knew anything about payroll in the entire Canadian government, all at once, and hired 500 brand new people in one call center to work with the brand new software as it rolled out. The new software doesn't include code for a lot of "special cases" which together represent a lot of cases. The new people have no idea how to solve most pay problems (people problems OR software problems). They get four days of training.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/phoenix-falling-pay-cen...
"Phoenix was supposed to cut our work in half. It actually doubled our work. So, you can't get rid of 2,000 people ... and double the work and expect the work to get done," one said."
Overall, even if the software worked perfectly the execution would have been a disaster.