End-of-Year process positive for Novopay, Steven Joyce, 17 January 2014:
Minister Responsible for Novopay Steven Joyce says a 100 per cent completion rate for schools involved in the End-of-Year process and an accompanying low error rate are tributes to the hard work done by school administrators and Novopay staff and contractors.
School payroll improving again, Steven Joyce, 26 March 2014:
“Pay Period 26 was back below the 0.5 per cent acceptable steady state error rate as defined by the Novopay technical review. Transactions volumes also dropped from around 30,000 in the previous pay period to 23,000. It shows the system is settling down again after the high volumes and high error rate of the last three pay periods connected to the Start of Year process,” Mr Joyce says.
School pay continues improvement, Steven Joyce, 23 April 2014:
The latest Novopay complaints reports confirm the system is settling back into a more consistent and steady state after the busy start-of-year period.
[...]
“The performance of the school payroll in Pay Periods 1 and 2 were back well within the 0.5 per cent acceptable steady state error rate as defined by the Novopay technical review and compares favourably with the same pay periods last year,” Mr Joyce says.
Update on school pay performance, Steven Joyce, 20 May 2014:
The latest Novopay complaints reports show the school payroll system is maintaining a steady performance.
Pay Period performance steady, Steven Joyce, 25 July 2014:
Latest figures show the school payroll system maintained a steady performance for each of the last four pay periods.
[...]
“All four pay periods were well within the 0.5 per cent acceptable steady state error rate as defined by the Novopay technical review, which is pleasing,” Mr Joyce says.
Government-owned company to take over school payroll, Steven Joyce, 30 July 2014:
New Zealand's school payroll service will come under Government management in October of this year.
After lengthy negotiations, the Ministry of Education and the existing school payroll provider, Talent2, have settled both on the amounts payable by Talent2 towards the costs of remediating the Novopay service and a new operating model for the school payroll system.
The new model involves a new government-owned company taking over the operation of the payroll service, and Talent2 licensing the core Alesco software to that company.
So, after a year of relentlessly up-beat press releases about "improvement" and "progress", suddenly we're looking at a government takeover (and one which involves continuing to pay Talent2 $9 million a year for software which clearly does not perform to specification). So, were they lying to us all along? Or is it just that some Cabinet Minister's relative didn't get paid? Either way, how can we trust anything the government says about its performance?
This ought to be a warning against outsourcing: it doesn't work, and we end up paying to clean up the mess. Sadly, the government is unlikely to view it that way.
