Wednesday, July 18, 2001 - 12:00 a.m. Pacific

WA - County may retry software

By Caitlin Cleary Seattle Times staff reporter

A new report details just how King County managed to run afoul of budgets and schedules, blowing through $38 million in an effort to replace its accounting and payroll software systems.

The report confirms what many suspected: The software wasn't to blame so much as politics and poor planning.

The project, called the Financial Systems Replacement Program (FSRP), was intended to be a sweeping software conversion, replacing the county's two financial-management and payroll systems with an integrated system. It was supposed to be fully operational by the Y2K deadline; it was never finished.

The report outlines a plan to get the computer system up and running. The timetable is for more than three years, at a cost of $27 million to $40 million.

Past investigations of county records showed the project failed mostly because of delays and cost overruns in one of its components, a payroll system for the county's 19,000 employees called PeopleSoft. There were reports of widespread payroll errors and employees ill-prepared to use the new system. Sims halted the project in June 2000.

A month later, the King County Council appropriated $3.7 million to shut down the system, ordering a comprehensive study of what went wrong.

The 300-page report, which cost $330,000, was conducted by outside consulting group Dye Management. It cautions county government to either make sure it's ready to play nice or else abandon FSRP altogether.

"The Dye report faults us for making it politicized," Sims said. "People wanted to reserve the right to throw sticks and rocks. If we continue to wrangle along partisan lines, if we cannot develop as one entity the goals to be achieved by the FSRP, then we should stop."

Next, the report will be sent to an advisory committee made up of representatives of the Metropolitan King County Council, the Sheriff's Office, the Prosecuting Attorney's Office and others. They will decide whether the county can work together to resume the project.

Sims, predicting "meetings ad nauseum," said he didn't know whether more work can be done on the system without the partisan infighting surrounding its failure.

"We're going to find out," he said. "And shame on any of us that can't."

King County has been trying to upgrade its finance and payroll computers since 1997, a year after it merged with the regional Metro agency.

PeopleSoft, the only part of the $38 million system that has been installed, currently pays one-third of all county employees. But that system had been reportedly full of errors since it went online in June 1999. The remaining two-thirds of county and former Metro employees are still paid on the older, separate computer systems, some using 20-year-old software.

"Are there errors made?" said Bob Cowan, finance director for King County. "Yes, but we've addressed the critical problems. We're in pretty good shape now in terms of PeopleSoft."

Sims said if the advisory committee decides to go forward with the FSRP, the money to pay for it is available through bonds.

"We will make no pretenses — this is not an inexpensive project," Cowan said. "I want to make sure when we do this, we do it right."

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/134319139_computer18m.html

-- Anonymous, July 18, 2001