Novopay

TVNZ has an article about Novopay, I swear to go it must have been written by an embedded union flunky. Look at this:

A new bug in the beleaguered Novopay system could see education staff sacked at the end of the school term.

The glitch is threatening to terminate contracts on April 21, many of them the contracts of permanent teaching staff.

Epsom Girls Grammar School is among the affected schools, with 21 staff members scheduled for termination.

Really? A software system can over-ride legal and statutory obligations, not to mention contractual employment conditions and unilaterally “sack” staff. What a load of horseshit. However it doesn’t get any better.

Read more »

via Newstalk ZB

If you were John Key, and you wanted to get rid of Hekia Parata as Education Minister, but you encountered significant resistance from the Bill English-led cabal in caucus, what would you do?

Well, you put Steven Joyce in charge as an “associate”.

Finally, someone who knows how to take charge of a problem.

Check out his report   Read more »

This is an email that the PPTA is sending out to people to get them to fill out a survey about Novopay.

No matter if you are unaffected…they don’t care, just fill it out anyway. Another thing to note is that the survey is not secure. I was able to access the results and change them if necessary from the link provided. I have removed the link and redacted part of it to protect the identity of my tipster. I have applied the bold to the text in this email.

From: survey-noreply@smo.surveymonkey.com [mailto:survey-noreply@smo.surveymonkey.com] On Behalf Of rwilletts@ppta.org.nz via surveymonkey.com
Sent: Wednesday, 27 February 2013
To: [Redacted]
Subject: ppta novopay survey

Dear [REDACTED]

PPTA is conducting a survey on the impacts of Novopay. We have received a number of requests to email the survey link directly to members.

Even if your own pay has been unaffected it would be helpful if you could complete the survey.

If you have already completed the survey on line over the last few days please ignore this email.

Here is a link to the survey:
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=[REDACTED]

The survey closes at 9 pm on the 5th March.

Please do not forward this message. Members who have not received this email can access the survey through a link on the PPTA website.

Thank you for your participation.

David Fisher tweeted this distasteful, disgraceful and shameful tweet this morning:

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A reader emails about Novopay:

Having observed the Novopay debacle over the last few months I have been dismayed by the lack of cold hard facts that would enable us to make an informed decision on this. Sure Parata has not handled it well but is the Novopay system actually that bad. The press has not told us what error rates are acceptable, what Novopay are achieving or what Datacom did before them. In frustration I did a quick bit of research online can came up with the following.

From two separate US studies I found an acceptable payroll error rate of 1.8%-2% is standard. Lets use 2% as it makes the maths easier. To be fair to Novopay we should probably use 3-4% in their first 6 months.

[Table 22 & 23 are relevant. Table 23 has the 1.8%. Table 22 actually shows around 95% first time error free which is really a 5% error rate.]

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The Herald yesterday carried an article that New Zealand schools had advanced $560,000 to teachers to cover Novopay errors.

According to official figures there are 2358 schools in New Zealand. That means on average they have had to advance $125 237 each – not a big deal. Apparently there are 7500 staff who have been mispaid – just over 3 per school – also not worth ripping your hair out for. It isn’t a good look but clearly many people who should be focussed on improving the lot of kids are well and truly out of proportion distracted.

The grizzling of teachers is the opposite of the traits you would expect them to look for in their students. On TV3 last night serial whiner Laurie Powell threatened to leave the country and stated that if he made those kind of errors he would get the sack. If he is the same Laurie Powell listed on “rate my teachers” it is clear some of his students do consider he makes those kind of mistakes and would mind if he was in another country.  Read more »

Once, every now and then, David Farrar comes up with a good idea. Today he has solved the teacher payroll problem.

The performance of the new payroll system does appear to have been not satisfactory. Having said that, have to be careful to make every single error a major story. I imagine the old payroll system would always have a dozen or so errors in it, out of 60,000 or so teachers paid. What I’d be keen to see reported is how many errors have occurred each pay period since it was implemented.

I do feel very sorry for those teachers and schools that have to cope with not being paid. Worse of all for them, there is nothing they can do about it.

That is why I have a solution. Bulk Funding. If we delegated salaries to every school, then each school would choose its own payroll provider (or do it themselves) and they could simply not use a company like Novopay, if there performance is not satisfactory.