Western Australia's non-education and health shared services unit within the Department of Treasury and Finance has re-jigged its roll-out program to agencies to take advantage of the simplification of staff award schemes.
Further analysis of the opportunities to simplify awards and elements within awards have resulted in an ability to bring forward larger agencies in the roll-in schedule
WA Govt spokesperson
The unit (formerly the Office of Shared Services) was set up in 2003
with expected costs of $91 million, to be offset by $50 million a year
savings on the government's $315 million back office budget.
The project was set to be completed by December 2006, with around 90 agencies to be using the services.
However by December 2007, the budget had blown out to $435 million. A new
plan was created, which scheduled project completion for 2013.
In a statement, a spokesperson for the unit last week confirmed it had decided to defer the second wave of the awards development portion of its
shared services project.
Yet the decision to move Wave 2 back six months was not a simple
deferment, according to the department, but instead a step which
entailed the combination of the second and third waves of
development — made possible by awards simplification.
Oracle had been required to design, build and test a human
resources system which provided payroll functions for 30 out of the
70 different employment awards and agreements operating in the
Western Australian public service. Difficulty in carrying out this
feat led to awards simplification opportunities being investigated.
"Further
analysis of the opportunities to simplify awards and elements
within awards have resulted in an ability to bring forward larger
agencies in the roll-in schedule," the statement said.
"This provides a window of opportunity to focus on short to
medium term agency roll-ins without the need to build awards
— it is therefore possible to combine the future award
'waves' without losing momentum on agency roll-ins.
"The combination of award waves reduces the cost of two major
projects back to a single project (combining wave 2 and 3) and
increases the quality of design over a larger group of awards,
thereby avoiding duplication and the potential for ambiguity in the
gathering of requirements and their interpretation as functional
software.
"To summarise, it has therefore been possible to advance the
capture of benefits and reduce risk and cost of multiple award
waves without delaying the roll-in schedule of agencies, although
it will result in the roll-ins of some smaller agencies being
deferred to accommodate the 'bringing forward' of larger agencies
that represent a greater benefit capture to government."
