Professional November 2016

Confessions of a payroll manager – Out with the old, in the with the new

Another episode in a series of occasional yet insightful/inciteful, anonymous and whimsical reports revealing the arcane, weird and sometimes torturous world of payroll frequented by payroll professionals. T here are times when you have to check you’re still in the real world. This happened today when I found myself conversing with the test version of our new payroll system. It’s not entirely surprising considering the amount of time I’ve spent looking at it, cursing it, babying it … and naming it Sidney. It started at the beginning of the week when the Crumbitt’s team got together with the Sleek Systems’ team at one of those awkward meetings where eye contact is avoided and alternating stomach grumbles make more conversation than do the attendees. Thankfully the atmosphere changed when Jace had a brain wave and opened a new box of Crumbitt’s Celebrational Crunchtastics, which are the jewels of the Crumbitt’s range and a total ice-breaker. To keep the atmosphere alive I instigated introductions asking everyone to include their best achievement so far. Jace announced an affair with a cast member of TOWIE [ The only way is Essex ] – not sure that’s an achievement – and one of the Sleek Systems’ workers divulged (and demonstrated) an incredible ability to fit half a punnet of red grapes in his mouth at once. Oh, and I was given a new job title (just for the implementation) of ‘change manager’. My first task was updating my Linked In profile and I duly received a confused email asking if ‘change manager’

was a real job or a request. Stevie Stevenson now calls me the change manager and refers to hot flushes and HRT [hormone replacement therapy]. As the data migration work stream began to flow, thoughts turned to the historic data. The ‘Sleeks’ wanted to ignore its existence and start afresh, but after I’d worn them down with a barrage of ‘whys’ a toddler would be proud of, they finally admitted it just made their job easier. They agreed that maybe – just maybe – some migration would be needed. Go Penny, change manager! A quiet, intense character called Cameron Crampton appeared the next day and, without a word, set up three monitors, two mobile phones and a laptop, and proceeded to migrate data, while making the whole thing look like something out of The Matrix . To be fair, he made a job that would have taken us around six years to figure out take about three hours. After we’d thanked Cameron and said farewell we turned to the system build. As Saundra, the system designer, proceeded to outline restrictions, concerns etc I imagined the whole thing being narrated by Kevin McCloud. You know, lots of ‘not in budget’, ‘not on the plans’ or ‘could end in disaster’. What struck me though was how much I actually knew about the nuts and bolts of it all; how overtime is calculated, who gets extra annual leave, the fact that Bob in the warehouse only really gets an additional payment because he came up with the idea of Crumbitt’s baked bean flavoured popcorn. You know, important nuggets like that. Training was the next headache, I mean development opportunity, so I led on this knowing my team better than the

‘Sleeks’ ever could (or would want to, for that matter). After an anxious start for all, I reassured the team that change is good and that we were all more than capable of handling new things. We just had to empty our minds of the old and make space for the new. Jace emptied his head incredibly quickly (maybe not much there to begin with?) and by the end of the training and copious note taking, the room was buzzing with excitement. Most loved the new features especially uploading their own photo to their profile – although Evie’s ‘glamour shot’ was probably not appropriate (note to self: protocol). Now, about me and Sidney … We’d been parallel running for two nights – fuelled by the traditional mountain of pizza supported by a variety of misshapes and broken stuff from the factory floor – and we’d reached a high when the build, data and net pay all aligned. (It was a heady moment.) As the team drifted home in a kind of euphoric but shattered mass of swaying bodies and celebrational songs I remained behind and found myself thanking the system for being kind to us. Call it tiredness (or cheese overdose) but I heard Sidney’s voice in my head promising to always look after us. Given our love/hate relationship with our previous system (which I actually feel rather bereft and sad about now it’s going) I think I’ll reserve judgement. Next time we’ll be going live. Can Sidney handle it? More importantly, can we? ❑ The Editor: Any resemblance to any payroll manager or professional alive or dead, or any payroll department or organisation whether apparently or actually portrayed in this article is simply fortuitous.

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| Professional in Payroll, Pensions and Reward |

Issue 25 | November 2016

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