requirements had been defined. Just not by the person who knew what they actually were. This was framed as an HR and workforce transformation, a broad strategic initiative of which payroll was just one component. And when payroll is just one component, it tends to get treated that way. The exciting conversations are about the employee experience, the self- service portals, the data and reporting. Payroll is the bit at the end that everyone assumes will just work. It is a reasonable assumption, right up until it isn’t. Testing had been done. But passing tests is not the same as being ready. A payroll system can look fine in a controlled test environment and still come apart when processing thousands of real employees. Real data is messier. Real volumes expose things that testing does not. Real people, managers, employees, team leaders, interact with a system differently than testers do. None of this is unusual. What matters is what an organisation does when testing flags problems. If issues were identified before go-live and the decision was made to proceed anyway, that is not a testing failure. That is a governance decision. And governance
decisions have owners. When the HCM went live, Bruce’s phone did not stop ringing. It started with calls that did not have a clear problem yet, just a feeling. Darren from maintenance: My pay doesn’t look right, I’ve been here twelve years, and I know what I’m supposed to get. Karen from the contact centre: nothing had come through at all. A team leader from operations who had been overpaid and had no idea what that meant for him. Within days, Bruce had a spreadsheet of hundreds of employees with discrepancies. Overpayments sitting next to underpayments. Superannuation contributions that had not
A payroll system can look fine in a controlled test environment and still come apart when processing thousands of real employees. Real data is messier. Real volumes expose things that testing does not.
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ISSUE 26 GLOBAL PAYROLL MAGAZINE
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