QHS and its Payroll System Project Failure | Report

Running head: QUEENSLAND HEALTH AND ITS PAYROLL SYSTEM PROJECT FAILURE
QHS and its Payroll System Project Failure
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QHS AND ITS PAYROLL SYSTEM PROJECT FAILURE1
Table of Contents
1. Primary Issue with Queensland Health and Payroll System.......................................................2
2. Failures during Early Project Implementation.............................................................................2
3. Schedule Delays and Cost Overruns............................................................................................4
4. Early Delivery Method for the Project........................................................................................4
5. Changes during Recent Delivery Method....................................................................................5
6. Recommendations for Project Manager towards the Project......................................................6
References........................................................................................................................................8

QHS AND ITS PAYROLL SYSTEM PROJECT FAILURE2
1. Primary Issue with Queensland Health and Payroll System
In the year 2006, the Queensland Health, Australia had decided to bring in a new form of
payroll system for their employees. In order to achieve this purpose, the Queensland Health had
chosen IBM Australia as the primary contractor for implementing a new payroll system in the
year 2007. The initial price of the contract was set at approximately $46.5 million (Queensland
Health payroll fail: Government ordered to pay IBM costs 2020). The project indicated towards
developing of a new kind of payroll system, which was expected to be finished in a time duration
of six months.
From the discussion and analysis of the case in relation to designing the new payroll
system for QHS, it can be discussed that there were many issues that lead towards the poor kind
of implementation of the payroll system (Paterno and Zhao 2018). Software analysts and project
manager had pointed to the facts that inappropriate form of resource allocations, misaligned
goals, poor communications and insufficient resources were considered as the primary issue
towards the poor implementation of the system.
In this project, the management of various combinations of wage payments for over
24,000 workers were withhold. Based on noticing the worst case of the QHS, the IBM Company
had planned for initiating and completing the entire project in just a time period of six months
(Pain et al. 2015). In this prospect, a certain lack of various identifiable objectives were leading
towards a significant cause for the failure of the total project outputs.

QHS AND ITS PAYROLL SYSTEM PROJECT FAILURE3
2. Failures during Early Project Implementation
During the time of preparing of the project contract between State of Queensland and
IBM Australia, the initial idea was set for replacing of the aging payroll system at QHS.
However, during the progress over the project, there were a series of 35,000 payroll mistakes,
which had ultimately raised the project budget to an amount of AU $1.25 billion (Paver and
Duffield 2019). When the payroll system was put under live operating conditions, a large
percentage of employees at Queensland Health, which included staff, doctors and nurses were
paid incorrect amounts and some of them were not paid at all.
The obvious failures that had been made during the early phase of implementation of the
designing of the payroll system for QHS are discussed as follows:
1. Improper form of communication had led to poor form of communication of business
requirements to IBM. The Queensland Health had not specified their business complexity to
IBM based on which they would design an efficient payroll system (Carlton and Peszynski
2018). Hence, due to a poor level of communication of initial business requirements, the final
project costs had escalated to four times while taking three months longer than the expected time
of delivery.
2. Cost overruns and time constraints were the leading reasons for letting the system to go
to a live test condition without going through the testing phase, which further led to certain cases
of 35,000 anomalies (Carlton 2018). In these case, it occurred that some of the employees were
partially or not paid at all while on the other hand, the system had inadvertently paid extra
amounts to their thousands of employees leading to complicated situations.