Instead of Paychecks, New System Brought Frustration

Four thousand Harvard employees began the year with an unpleasant e-mail surprise—an electronic pink slip. And though the massive layoff was a glitch, further technological and administrative difficulties meant that some student employees went unpaid for as much as two months.

This was the inauspicious kickoff to the University’s Human Resources (HR) Project and new Peoplesoft payroll software—an update to a personnel tracking system that was over a half century old.

Like the disastrous implementation of new financial software known as ADAPT in 1999, the rollout of the HR Project was plagued with glitches.

Scores of students stopped receiving paychecks after the conversion to the online payroll system in September and October. Dorm Crew workers and intramural (IM) referees were two of the hardest hit groups.

Some students even put off buying books for their courses because the University failed to pay them on time for their work.

At the end of October, Hannah E. Wright ’06 had not received a single paycheck for her work as an IM referee.

“They owe me almost $350,” she said at the time. “I need [the] job to help pay for school.”

Elizabeth J. Quinn ’04, who held a work-study job at the Boston Medical Center, received her first paycheck a month late—and it wasn’t even for the correct amount. She was owed more than $400 at one point.

“As a financial aid recipient, I owe my parents $2,000,” she said. “It’s been hard because they really need the money.”

Administrators scrambled to fix the glitches in the new system.

Martha E. Homer, director of the Student Employment Office (SEO), had been working with Harvard’s Office of Human Resources (OHR) and Peoplesoft consultants in the fall to work out the problems. But with many students still unpaid after a month of waiting, she said in October that she was not convinced the new computer system was an improvement.

“So far, it is clearly more hassle than it’s worth,” Homer said at the time.

While difficulties were expected with the rollout, administrators did not expect such widespread problems.

“Peoplesoft, our new payroll system, seems to be working quite well,” said Marilyn D. Touborg, the OHR director of communications on Oct. 15. “This [problem] is certainly upsetting to the people it is affecting, but if you look also at the enormity of the project, by and large it has gone very well.”

Administrators publicized a hotline for paycheck issues and formed a “SWAT team” of College, Faculty of Arts and Sciences and central administration officials who were dispatched to deal with individual cases.

And while the initial problems appeared to have largely subsided by mid-November, the lessons of last fall’s debacle will likely remain with administrators.

“Nobody wants to go through what happened this year,” Touborg said.

She said some of the blame for the malfunctions was due to uninformed students.

“We did a good job of informing employees of those changes. That was not true of the student population,” Touborg said. “That was a gap in our planning, and this year we hope to make up for that.”

The problems arose mostly with student and other temporary employees, especially with those who held multiple University jobs. The new system initially had difficulty handling students who worked more than one job.

Another problem was the large amount of data entry that was required to enter new employees into the database, often delaying the hiring of new employees. Many students were not entered into the system by the time their paydays came around.

As a result, the OHR plans to unveil a new “quick hire” form by the end of August, in time for the beginning of the fall semester. The systems will also be modified to update the database more frequently with new entries.

Further planned changes include online benefits processing and a system for entering paid time off.

Adapting to ADAPT

The HR Project was the second phase of a ten year plan to update Harvard’s financial systems.

The push for a new financial system started in 1993.

In 1994, Harvard kicked off the Adaptive Data Project, which involved about 400 University faculty and staff in an exhaustive review of data systems.

After prototype testing throughout 1995, the database company Oracle was chosen to design the software for the new systems.

In a phase known as Project ADAPT, the Oracle financial software was installed in 1999.

The first part of Project ADAPT was criticized for being “user-hostile,” and as administrators looked ahead to the next phase—the HR Project—they said they had learned their lesson: they would consult more with users and make the new systems more friendly.

The HR Project was originally supposed to use software from Oracle as well. But in May 2001, the University opted to switch its HR systems to software designed by Peoplesoft, Inc.

Nevertheless, the transition to Peoplesoft had many of the same problems as the transition to Project ADAPT. There seemed to be, at least temporarily, a breakdown in communication between the administrators implementing the system and the users—or at least the student users—of the new system.

According to Touborg, administrators were constantly reassessing the project.

“The scope of the project kept being reviewed both in terms of complexity and in terms of time and money,” she said. “We used a lot of consultants in the process…[and] using their time is very expensive.”

The cost, which Vice President for Finance Ann E. Berman declines to estimate, was a necessary one, administrators said.

“Neither project [ADAPT nor HR] was done to save money,” she wrote in an e-mail. “Both were necessary to replace outdated and inadequate administrative systems that were well past the end of their useful lives.”

Touborg said the University will continue to improve and refine the new financial systems.

“What we have now is a good foundation for going forward,” Touborg said. “We would certainly like to enhance this system.”

But for now, the major upheaval in financial systems is over.

“There are no large-scale implementations in the offing,” she said.

—Staff writer Stephen M. Marks can be reached marks@fas.harvard.edu.