In depth: RMIT's PeopleSoft disaster

The system was supposed to be a masterstroke of integration. One platform which could handle basic student administration tasks as well as Web-enrolments, the alumni system and other peripheral tasks. It went live in October 2001 -- the problems that followed have cost the university more than AU$47 million, a figure equal to 3.7 times the original budget, according to Victoria's Auditor General.

According to Morris, the failure wasn't so much to do with the associated technology, but in the University's approach to its administration practices. The roll-out of the new system coincided with an administrative overhaul -- subject codes and student numbers were changed and familiar conventions thrown out the window.

"The change on both fronts was underestimated and the time allowed to actually go through the implementation given the impact of that change was underestimated," Morris said. "The system went live at a time when from a technology perspective or from a business ready perspective it wasn't ready to go live... and that compounded problems."

"The most visible failure at the outset was our Web-enrolments failed. That was a technology piece... we were not able to enrol those students in the way that we intended so we then had to go back to a fall-back position of how to enrol those students," Morris told ZDNet Australia . "That was the first time that it affected students. That was a technology failure... but it's a combination of the technology issues and the business process issues."

"One of the lessons learned is that there wasn't enough of a fallback position if something went wrong," he added.

From the outset, the extent of the impact of the somewhat bungled changes weren't clear -- Morris says there was an expectation that the early issues were just teething problems. "In the early stages people were expecting that it was just going to be a technology problem that would be fixed fairly easily and then we would move on, but that [wasn't] the case," he said.

By the time the University realised how deep it was in, it was too late to roll back. "One of the issues that we had is... we couldn't go back to the old system... we had to change the way we configured our courses by going to a new system," he explained. "So even though the old system was here and we could have physically turned it back on, we really didn't have the option of going back to it."

So what was the root cause of all these problems? Morris says the go-live date was simply unrealistic. "The planning that happens through the preparation side is essential. The communications to all the people who were going to be users of the system, the training, the project management, are all areas we have acknowledged we should have done better in. One of the issues we've had was that we were rushing to meet a live date because there's only two times in the academic calendar when you can go live with a system like that. There was a rush to hit that October live date and the result of that is that the time that we would have otherwise spent in planning and training and communicating and consulting wasn't as good as it should have been."

Morris is diplomatic about PeopleSoft's sales approach, saying the IT industry as a whole has a tendency to oversell. "The IT industry... has a fairly poor track record of people selling things off PowerPoint slides," he said. "It's an industry issue. In a sales cycle someone will say 'does the system do this?' and the answer will be well, 'yes, it can do that'. But there's not enough time given to [ask] 'how is it going to do that? Is it going to do that in a new release of the software? Does it do that in its current version or is it going to require a modification to do that?'."

So where to from here? A big change in approach. "In its current form I think most people would tell you that it hasn't delivered a lot as compared to the old system... what we've said in terms of re-implementing is that if you're going to take a system like a PeopleSoft system or a SAP system you have to come from the premise that it's been developed usually with best practice in mind. What you should always try to do is rather than trying to modify the system to suit your processes at all times try to look at ways of modifying your processes to suit the system."

"What we're now focussing on is [having] PeopleSoft as the core for student administration and that will be enhanced or supported by other software in other areas."

Having joined RMIT only a few months before the system went live, Morris says the problems have represented a huge personal challenge. "It's been... an internal marketing job in terms of marketing to the university the need to look at IT from a holistic perspective, not just from a point solution perspective... you wrap all that up and personally it's just an enormous challenge," he said. "When I joined RMIT [I] sort of didn't know what was around the corner... I have enjoyed grabbing the opportunity with both hands and turning it around."