Government to take over Novopay

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nedkelly

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#150673 30-Jul-2014 11:55

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=11301418

https://nz.finance.yahoo.com/news/government-to-take-over-novopay-233238257.html

This could make things interesting in the long running Novopay saga.

jonb

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#1098516 30-Jul-2014 12:03

Would be interesting to know how much less Talent2/Novopay bidded for the education payroll contact than Datacom's bid. Then take that cost away from how much extra has been spent on it since..

wasabi2k

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#1098527 30-Jul-2014 12:23

Must have been significant given Datacom had been payment processing for a long time before Novopay.

jonb

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#1098560 30-Jul-2014 13:16

Good post from NZBen about the whole saga from a year ago:

http://www.ben.geek.nz/2013/03/novopay-technical-review-for-dummies/

insane

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#1098581 30-Jul-2014 13:46

I just can't for the life of me understand what upcoming event may have triggered this.

JWR

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#1098583 30-Jul-2014 13:48

From NZ Herald...

Mr Joyce said the agreement should ''not necessarily be seen as failure on anyone's part any more than it had been''.

LOL

Glassboy

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#1098882 30-Jul-2014 22:15

jonb: Would be interesting to know how much less Talent2/Novopay bidded for the education payroll contact than Datacom's bid. Then take that cost away from how much extra has been spent on it since..

You're making an assumption that Datacom didn't price itself out of the game deliberately. Often what is written as a win for a new vendor is the old vendor effectively firing the client.

What is also missing from all reporting is how poor nearly every payroll system actually is.

graemeh

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#1099074 31-Jul-2014 10:09

insane: I just can't for the life of me understand what upcoming event may have triggered this.

I thought their timing was perfect and people are already being shown on TV saying how great they think it is.

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Dingbatt

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#1099076 31-Jul-2014 10:10

insane: I just can't for the life of me understand what upcoming event may have triggered this.

Since 90% of teachers would probably vote Labour anyway, I don't know how much the upcoming election would have precipitated this action. If a Labour led government is in power in October it would bookend this saga quite nicely as they were the ones who signed up for novopay initially just before leaving the treasury benches last time.

Interesting point made above about datacom sacking their client, I hadn't heard of that before but sounds feasible. But if I remember rightly didn't they fight a valiant rearguard action before handing over to talent2? Or is that part of the show as well?

“We’ve arranged a society based on science and technology, in which nobody understands anything about science technology. Carl Sagan 1996

cr250bromo

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#1099085 31-Jul-2014 10:20

The fact a previous government implemented something is often used as an excuse when it turns bad; that doesn't exempt the current government from doing their best to resolve the situation. The blame might be fair 6 months after a change of government, but 6 years after? that's more than enough time to take any action required.

andrewNZ

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#1099087 31-Jul-2014 10:22

The thing that bugs me, is the fact that they turned it on in the first place.

Tallent2 took over the NZ Post payroll a year or two prior, and it was an unmitigated disaster. We had all the same problems, and there are still some problems 3+ years on.
The system for Post cant even easily do some things like parental leave or claiming sick days during annual leave.

jnimmo

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#1099134 31-Jul-2014 10:52

Look forward to making an official information act request on how much it will cost them to run each year
Sounds like either the platform has either very bad architecture, or the MOE just has a far too complicated pay structure and actually the real problem is they need to simplify the pay structure processes rather than just trying to replicate what Datacom had evolved their platform to deal with.

Ragnor

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#1102635 5-Aug-2014 14:07

jonb: Good post from NZBen about the whole saga from a year ago:

http://www.ben.geek.nz/2013/03/novopay-technical-review-for-dummies/

also http://www.ben.geek.nz/2013/03/fixing-novopay-and-other-big-it-projects/ is bang on

These kind of huge replace everything at once projects never ever work correctly, on time or remotely on budget.

It should have been broken down into separate manageable components as described in the blog post linked above.