04:05
ISSUE 1
“Members of the payroll community around the world have countless examples of how payroll transformations went wrong or just barely avoided disaster.”
3. Testing is non-negotiable : Despite high error rates during testing, the Phoenix executives pushed the system live in early 2016, due to political pressures or the misconception that fixing issues after launch would be cheaper than waiting. In reality, taking time to get the payroll system right before a launch is almost certainly going to save money down the road. To wit: The Next Gen HR and Pay solution is carefully being tested in select departments before moving ahead. “So the last six months for us have been about working with seven departments to actually be in a room and start standardising processes,” Benay says. “I’ve approached this personally in the mindset of ‘we will not do another big bang, and we will do this incrementally.’” 4. Don’t discount institutional knowledge : When the Phoenix pay executives pushed the system to launch in early 2016, it was partly because they were trying to achieve cost savings from anticipated workforce adjustments. In 2012, the Canadian government’s payroll workforce was composed of 2,000
compensation advisors working in more than 100 government departments and agencies. Over four years, about 1,200 of those positions were eliminated, and 460 pay advisor positions were created in Miramichi, a move that had politica l reasons. Previously, compensation advisors spent about 18 to 24 months in training. But some pay advisers in the new payroll centre in Miramichi received only a few days of training before getting to work. That was a recipe for disaster. When the pay problems started piling up in 2016, the government had to open satellite pay offices and re-hire some of the laid-off compensation advisers to manage the workload. 5. Configurations, not customizations : Building out custom solutions is a dangerous game when it comes to long- term support for a payroll system. As the Canadian government is working on the NextGen HR and Pay project, its partners are taking the lessons from Phoenix in stride. “Customization is when you take software and you manipulate it specifically for one customer, and then that customer is responsible for
Made with FlippingBook Annual report maker