California payroll overhaul vexed by complexity, poor oversight

Sacbee — Controller John Chiang's office spun an upbeat message about efforts to overhaul the state's aging payroll system for years, while behind the scenes the massive IT project was in disarray, according to a new state analysis released this morning.

The report by the Senate Office of Oversight and Outcomes this morning concludes that officials running the now-defunct 21st Century/MyCalPays project kept pouring money into the program despite clear and early warnings from insiders that the program was foundering on many levels:

"These basic, core problems included the state's payroll complexity, data conversion, staff vacancies, organizational change management (the process of teaching and selling the new system to existing staff), the absence of a quality assurance team, and an inability to stay on schedule ..."

The report is the first official public post-mortem on the 10-year, quarter-billion-dollar twice-failed effort to modernize the state's payroll system. Chiang inherited the project from his predecessor, former State Controller Steve Westly.

Senate investigators examined the program from the state management side and concluded that cultural resistance to change also hampered the project. For example, some departments -- "CalFire, the State Water Resources Control Board, Caltrans and, surprisingly, the California Technology Agency" - fell behind schedule for adopting the payroll management system, the report notes. continue reading...