Failure of Applying Project Management Concepts in Queensland Health Payroll Project

This report evaluates the failure of applying project management concepts in the Queensland Health Payroll Project and provides recommendations for improvement.

Running head: PROJECT MANAGEMENT PRINCIPLES
Project Management Principles: Queensland Health Payroll Project
Name of Student
Name of University
Author Note

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Table of Contents
Introduction..........................................................................................................................2
1. Queensland Health Payroll Project..................................................................................2
2. Failure of Applying Project Management Concepts.......................................................3
2.1. Project scope Management.......................................................................................3
2.2. Project Time Management........................................................................................4
2.3. Project Cost management.........................................................................................4
2.4. Project Quality Management....................................................................................4
2.5. Project Human Resource management.....................................................................5
2.6. Project Communications Management.....................................................................5
2.7. Project Risk management.........................................................................................5
2.8. Project Stakeholder Management.............................................................................5
2.9. Project Procurement Management............................................................................6
2.10. Project Integration Management.............................................................................6
Conclusion...........................................................................................................................6
Recommendations................................................................................................................6
References............................................................................................................................8

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Introduction
The report will be based on post-project review of a completed project. For this report, a
case study of the Queensland Health Payroll System is chosen. This is a case of project failure.
The implementation of the payroll did not turn out in the way it is expected. Inaccurate or lack of
use of PM tools and techniques has contributed to the failure of this project. A number of
reviews from legal, administrative and audit perspective were made, which reveal that lack of
planning and governance has resulted in a delay in completion of the project and has contributed
to the project going over budget. In the year 2010, Queensland Health implemented its first stage
of rostering system which aimed in replacing the existing payroll system. The project was
undertaken and implemented by CorpTech under the state’s treasury department. However, the
outcome of this implemented project can be described as spectacular failure in a number of
aspects. The delivery of the project was delayed by almost 2 years and the project went 300%
over budget (Thite & Sandhu, 2014). Yet, the project team could not deliver a flawless payroll
system. This post-project review will evaluate the failure of the project management team in
applying appropriate project management principles in the Queensland Health (QH) Payroll
Project.
1. Queensland Health Payroll Project
The QH Payroll Project involved implementation of a planned two-stage implementation
of new rostering and payroll system. The project aimed in replacing the existing payroll system.
The Project was owned by Queensland Health System (QHS) that provides public healthcare
services in Queensland Province of Australia (Eden & Sedera, 2014). Although the project was
planned, a number of factors added to the disaster. One of the major issues associated with the
QH Payroll Project is that there was an insufficient calculation of the scope and term of the QH
project. The implementation of the Queensland health payroll project involved managing over
24,000 combination of the payments of nearly 80,000 workers and subcontractors (Carlton &
Peszynski, 2018). The existing payroll system was quite ineffective and therefore, the project
become a high priority project. Since it was a high priority project, IBM estimated to take only
seven months for completion, which is an incorrect estimation for project execution.

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Out of the implementation time of 7 months, a constricted time of two weeks were
allocated at the start of the project. This time was allocated to scope out the major business
requirements. The project lacked identification of the project objectives.
The project further had problems of inexperienced leadership. This project was the first
attempt for IBM Australia. The Queensland Health payroll project was complex and it lacked
appropriate project leadership and governance. After the start of the QH Payroll project,
controlling the same became a challenge (Asgarkhani et al., 2017). This is because, it appeared
to be a lot of oversight of the program. The project although rolled out in the year 2010, the
system was not working properly. An analysis of the problem revealed that a fully functional can
be delivered, however, it would take almost 5 years for the same. The failure of project
implementation in an appropriate manner resulted in budget overrun. The final cost of the project
turned out to be AU $1.2 Billion instead of the initial budget of AU $836 M (McNeill, 2015).
The state paid for the initial project cost after investigating the root cause of project failure.
Failure of applying needed project management principles has contributed to the failure
of the QH payroll project. The project management performance could have been improved
through the adoption of appropriate theoretical project delivery process. The section below
discusses the failure of this project in applying appropriate project management concepts in
project implementation.
2. Failure of Applying Project Management Concepts
The PMBOK identifies certain core knowledge areas that are effective for successful
implementation of a project. There are 10 project management knowledge areas, based on which,
the Queensland Health Payroll project will be analysed. Apart from that, there are five major PM
processes, which are project initiation, project planning, project execution, monitoring and
control and project closing (Varajão, Colomo-Palacios & Silva, 2017). The following sections
analyses the Queensland health Payroll project on basis of 10 knowledge areas.
2.1. Project scope Management
Project scope management relates to a number of processes that ensure that the scope of
the project is correctly defined. As indicated in the previous section of the report, one of the

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most significant reasons behind the failure of the project is ineffectiveness of the project team in
correctly defining the scope of the project (Karaman & Kurt, 2015). The project was complex,
yet the complexity of the project could not be correctly estimated at the commencement of the
project.
It was responsibility of project team and project manager to scope out the critical
business requirements at the start of the project. However, for this task, only two weeks were
allocated out of the total time of seven months (Morien, 2014). This time was insufficient for
identifying the critical business requirements of the project. Therefore, lack of appropriate scope
identification and lack of identifiable project objective which is found to be a significant cause of
project failure.
2.2. Project Time Management
Project Time management is an important aspect of project management. Appropriate
time estimation and time management is necessary for ensuring successful project completion
(Varajão, 2016). The QH Project was a failure, as this project could not be completed within the
scheduled time. IBM Australia was ineffective in calculating the actual time required for
completion of the project. IBM Australia underestimated the time required to execute the project
and projected that the QH payroll project will be completed within 7 months. On examining the
project and its complexities, it is found out that the time of 7 months was too low for
implementation of that complex project.
2.3. Project Cost management
The Queensland health Payroll project was a disaster particularly because the project
went over budget by 300% of the original budget. It was an inefficiency of the project team to
estimate the budget for this complex project. The project cost management is mainly associated
with the process of project planning, controlling and budget of actual project or a business
(Kerzner & Kerzner, 2017). The budget should involve all the project processes including,
project planning, execution, monitoring and control. The Queensland Health Payroll project team
failed to complete the project within the approved budget.
2.4. Project Quality Management

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The Queensland Health Payroll project could not achieve the desired project quality. This
is because the project team failed to set appropriate quality metrics. When the project went live
in the year 2010, an ineffective payroll system was delivered that failed to manage the payroll of
the employees.
2.5. Project Human Resource management
There were issues with the human resource management of QH payroll project that led to
the failure of the same (Duffield & Whitty, 2015). The project human resource management for
Queensland project was ineffective as there have been lack of collaboration among the project
team members.
2.6. Project Communications Management
Communication is the key for effective project management. One of the most significant
reason behind the failure of the project improper communication among the team members. The
Queensland Health payroll project faced issues of ineffective scope identification that was one of
the effect of ineffective communication among the team member.
2.7. Project Risk management
Risks in a project refers to uncertainties that can hamper the normal operations of a
project. One of the major reasons behind the Queensland Health Payroll Project is ineffective
risk management. The project team failed to identify the major risks associated with the project
(Carlton, 2018). The Queensland Health Payroll project had risks related to schedule and budget
which were needed to be identified and mitigated during the project implementation phase,
which was not done. This led to the failure of the QH Payroll Project.
2.8. Project Stakeholder Management
This knowledge area of PMBOK establishes the importance of project stakeholders in
project management. Queensland Health Payroll Project was a disaster particularly because the
project team members and the stakeholders had no specific idea of the needs and scope of the
QH payroll project. There was no specific plan of stakeholder management that contributed to

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the project failure. It is established from the case of QH Payroll Project that the ineffective
stakeholders’ engagement can led to project failure.
2.9. Project Procurement Management
The post project review indicates that there were no major issue related to procurement in
Queensland Health Payroll project (Paterno & Zhao, 2018). However, lack of proper scope
identification and improper project estimation has led to the failure of this project. The
complexity of the project was underestimated leading to its failure.
2.10. Project Integration Management
Queensland Health Payroll system had issues related to project integration management.
Project integration management can be defined as the process and activities that are needed to be
identified, defined and combined to coordinate all the activities associated with the management
and implementation of a project (Juiz & Toomey, 2015). However, the project lacked
coordination leading to inappropriate scope identification and project failure.
Conclusion
The report performs a post-project review of a completed project “Queensland Health
Payroll Project” and evaluates the reason of its failure. The report is based on review of the
project management areas which could have been improved and which could have led to
successful project implementation. The main reason of project failure is found to be improper
scope identification and time estimation. The project review evaluates the knowledge areas of
PMBOK and concludes that the future project performance could be improved through adoption
of different theoretical project delivery process.
Recommendations
The drastic failure of the Queensland Health Payroll Project proves to be an important
lesson learnt for the future projects. The project proves that appropriate theoretical knowledge
about project management knowledge areas, process groups, and PM tools and techniques are
necessary to successfully implement and conduct a project. The recommendations on how

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project management performance could be improved through adoption of the major theoretical
project delivery process are discussed in the paragraphs below-
Scope Identification: One of the most significant lesson learnt from the Queensland
Health Payroll Project is that enough time is needed to be allocated for scope identification. The
project team should have proper knowledge about the scope management process and time
required for scope identification of complex project like Queensland Health Payroll Project.
Realistic Schedule: Unrealistic time allocation is considered to be one of the most
significant reason behind the project failure. Therefore it is recommended that future project
should be allocated with realistic time to avoid project failure.
Coordination among Team Members: One of the vital aspects of project management is
effective coordination among the team members, which is necessary to communicate the major
issues that a project might face.

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References
Asgarkhani, M., Cater-Steel, A., Toleman, M., & Ally, M. (2017, December). Failed IT projects:
is poor IT governance to blame?. In Proceedings of the 28th Australasian Conference on
Information Systems (ACIS 2017). Australian Association for Information Systems.
Carlton, D. (2018). Situational Incompetence: An Investigation into the Causes of Failure of a
Large-Scale IT Project. In Dark Sides of Organizational Behavior and Leadership.
IntechOpen.
Carlton, D., & Peszynski, K. (2018, June). Situational Incompetence: The Failure of Governance
in the Management of Large Scale IT Projects. In International Working Conference on
Transfer and Diffusion of IT (pp. 224-244). Springer, Cham.
Duffield, S., & Whitty, S. J. (2015). Developing a systemic lessons learned knowledge model for
organisational learning through projects. International journal of project
management, 33(2), 311-324.
Eden, R., & Sedera, D. (2014). The largest admitted IT project failure in the Southern
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Information Systems: Building a Better World Through Information Systems. AISeL.
Juiz, C., & Toomey, M. (2015). To govern IT, or not to govern IT?. Commun. ACM, 58(2), 58-
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Kerzner, H., & Kerzner, H. R. (2017). Project management: a systems approach to planning,
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Paterno, P., & Zhao, S. (2018). Queensland Health: Australia's Healthcare IT
Catastrophe. Proceedings of the Northeast Business & Economics Association.
Thite, M., & Sandhu, K. (2014). Where is My Pay? Critical Success Factors of a Payroll
System–A System Life Cycle Approach. Australasian Journal of Information
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Varajão, J. (2016). Success Management as a PM knowledge area–work-in-progress. Procedia
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Varajão, J., Colomo-Palacios, R., & Silva, H. (2017). ISO 21500: 2012 and PMBoK 5 processes
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