Novopay: More of the same to come – Joyce
"No doubt there would be a totally different approach to getting this resolved if this was impacting MP's monthly pay!"
Featured commentNearly 1500 school staff members around the country have complained of pay problems in the latest Novopay period.
Economic development minister Steven Joyce, who has been brought in to clean up the Novopay mess, has released PwC data from last week’s pay period which shows a total of $160 million was paid out to 78,351 staff.
This represented 3978 more staff than the previous pay cycle.
Of those nearly 1500 reportedly affected, 777 were not paid, 231 were overpaid and 471 staff were underpaid across nearly 450 schools.
Despite the slight improvement since pay period 23, Mr Joyce expects there to be similar levels of errors when the next pay period is calculated.
“We are continuing to see huge numbers of transactions in every pay period.”
He says last weekend’s planned release to address some of the most significant software bugs in the system resolved 78 defects.
The second release is planned in three weeks and Mr Joyce expects to be able to resolve another 140 bugs and a further 50 during the third and final release in April.
“The three releases are designed to reduce the level of pay calculations errors, improve the reporting to schools and provide some initial improvements in the user interface.”
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Comments and questions10
Why wasn't Novopay's contract terminated?
Probably because Joyce believes that would greatly prolong the agony compared with forcing Novopay to fix things. And I suspect he is correct so long as he is able to force competent management supervision.
This is costing our schools both in terms of administration time and stress on administration staff. It is a fundamental failure of project management and governance. It needs to cost the vendor millions in damages and key heads need to roll. Not politicians, but well paid management and consultants. The project manager should be talking to their insurers. This is not about blood on the table, this simply logical consequences of failure.
Business is about risk and reward. This is the risk bit. Failure means losing your shirt. And those suffering the brunt of this failure probably would like to see thos responsible held to account, rather than confidential settlements. So yes a little bit of blood on the floor
UN.BE.LIEVABLE
No No No What you must understand is that in central and local government NO-ONE is responsible NO-ONE is accountable. It's a systems failure. That's all. Nothing to see here. Now move on.
No doubt there would be a totally different approach to getting this resolved if this was impacting MP's monthly pay!
Why aren't they suing the wide boys who own Talent 2 who obviously purchased a store bought system, rebranded it with a fancy name and sold it to our government and likely paid some incentives on the way through? I think they're called marketing rebates.
From the begining I have asked how big has been the kick back that NZEI have received.
NZEI have been extremley quiet since the implementation of this system.
260 Bugs!
I wish I could sell some lame government ministers a system that has 260 errors in it from the git go. Cheque please. The additional $5 million that is being invested by NZ taxpayers is obviously going to hire staff who now have to fix this software. Can someone ask the minister when does she expect Talent2 to send the refund cheque??
I am amazed that such poor quality software reached the stage of implementation stage of development. Surely before this software was put into production, it should have been rigorously tested in parallel with what was the existing payroll system to ensure that the same pays were popping out the other end. Evidently not though... Who signed off on this piece of junk ?