How "Stick to Basics" did the turn around

How "Stick to Basics" did the turn around

This is the experience when I took over a portfolio of Development Projects. The portfolio was handed over to me with Profitability of - 7 % and the Customer Satisfaction of  15% (Percentage of Customers who recommend the Organization for other customers).m It was quite challenging when I met each of the Customers for the Projects of the Portfolio. There were as many as 8 Serious escalations and one Customer reached their procurement office to look for alternative vendor. My meeting went with full of grievances and concerns and I spent the first day to note down all the grievances without giving any response. On end of the day, I collated the inputs and arrived at a conclusion that all issues were boiling down to 6 major areas. Second day the trend continued but I was getting closer to the resolution path. Once my meetings were done I met the manager of all the Customers and requested him for breathing time of a month. He asked what is the kind of master plan that I had to resolve the issues that were continuing for more than a year. 

I explained him the top 3 reasons as Poor requirement gathering, Poor internal quality assurance and the Project Management. Even though all three functions were happening from my teams it needed some direction and regrouping in the way it was required. 

I made the testing and Solutioning as independent functions and isolated from the Project team. This means, Testing team does the testing fully with focus of identifying as many bugs as possible, to cover as many scenarios as possible, to test for breaking the system and allow for fixing and making a robust system. Without the testing team's consent the Components will not be given to the Customer for final testing. And all the internal testing, defects and resolution reports will be shared with the Customer on regular basis. The test leads were given direct connect with the Customers to operate independently instead of routing through the Project manager in the earlier model.

The Solutions team will be again working as independent units. they will do the requirement gathering, design/ validate the designs and test scripts and also oversee the deployment. The team ensures the coding is done with compliance to standards, covering security, performance, Look and feel aspects apart from meeting the required functionality. 

Project Management was taken over by me as I didnt want to take any chance. But I also setup an internal training through workshops for improving the Project Management skills. In the projects I was overseeing, I broke the entire phase in to daily activities and tracked at that levels. It was more like executing through Check list. No great science like Agile model or any sort of it, but I followed a simple principle of breaking the entire activities in to tasks of not more than a day duration with each task mapped to the resource. I filtered the tasks by dates and tracked on what is going well and what is not.  It took a week for me to make the plan and it went on it's own from than on-wards. 

Customer confidence was gained from the point when we made our work transperant to convince the customer that the team is working with dedication. the daily test reports, updates on any design changes even if they are very small, any alerts on the dates even if delayed by 1 day were a few items that provided the comfort to the Customer.

At the end, we got lot of accolades and we did 26 releases all either on time or ahead of schedule with no significant defects on Live or Post live of the deployment.

We also didn't lose any profitability in this process as the Project was not overrun. 

The major conclusion is that we didnt try to innovate any new methods, Processes or Best Practices and all we did is "Stick to Basics". Many times this is what works and we miss and look for innovations.

The below is the summary of challenges we faced and how we addressed them along with final outcomes.

Challenges

• Poor Product Quality (Large Defects)
• Requirement understanding and conflicts
• Project Overruns
• Project Management
• Attrition of Key people and failure to manage the impact
• Last minute Surprises

How we addressed in Planning & Design phase

• Progressive elaboration and Validation of Scope and Time Lines: Pre-planning exercise to finalize the project plan based on completion of requirement analysis & approval
• Pre-planning exercise culminates with delivery of agreed project execution plan.
• Design reviewed and approved by Independent Architects before presenting to Customer’s Technology Board  for Review 

How we addressed in  Execution Phase

• Daily Connect with Customer (S)
• Dedicated and Independent Testing team to certify the Deliverables before offering for User acceptance
• Full cycle of regression testing for any release (Major/Minor/Hotfix)
•  AS IS – TO BE documentation for any code changes to avoid redundancy
• TO BE code change review by  Tech lead & Architect before implementing
•  All DB changes reviewed by independent DBA before adding into code
• Daily Stand in Meeting
• Cross-skilled team, Documentation and SOPs  to offer flexibility and  address attrition

What we Achieved

• •Delivered 26 Releases either on time or ahead of schedule
• •Negligible defects identified in User Acceptance Tests
• •No impact of attrition to the Delivery due to the robust succession management
• •No Post production issues identified
• •Customer delight improved to 90%
• •Still achieved the Profitability of >20%

Peoplesoft fitment to Indian Payroll requirements

The below is the summary on how Peoplesoft Payroll can support the Indian Payroll requirements. All Indian Payroll requirements were gathered and analyzed on how the PS Payroll will be supporting each of the requirement.

Apart from the requirements, the document also covered the reporting requirements and how Payroll module of Peoplesoft support


With Indian Payroll changing on regular basis, the document may need updates. I request the readers to provide the inputs while the regular updates happen from here as well.

REQUIREMENT	Description	Fit/Gap	Suggestion for the Gap
Earnings
BASE SALARY	Basic Salary earned by the employees	Fit
BASE HOURLY	Hourly basic salary paid to the employee.This is applicable mostly for POI	Fit
Dearness Allownaces		Fit
House Rent Allowances		Fit
Lunch Allowances		Fit
Coveyance Allowances		Fit
Special Allowances		Fit
SHIFT Allowances	When Employee works in shift , the shift allowance is paid in percentage,hourly , fixed amount	Fit
OVERTIME 1.5	Overtime worked by the employee , the salary paid wil be 1.5 times the basic salary	Fit	Overrtime factor(here1.5) can be configured depending upon the organisations requirement
BONUS	bonus payment given to employees, based on the employee's performance and the performance of the company.	Fit
		Fit
Allowances Earnings		Fit
Leave travell allownaces payout	Leave tarvel allownaces paid to the employees	Fit
Medical allowances payout	medical allowances paid to the employees	Fit
		Fit
Tax		Fit
Income tax		Fit
Tax imposed on LTA		Fit
Tax imposed on Medical allowances		Fit
Tax imposed on Loan		Fit
Tax Reporting
Individual Income tax withholding report		Fit
Employee income payment detail report		Fit
Deductions
Loan Deduction	Use the LOAN deduction to calculate and deduct loan repayment amounts from an employee's pay	Fit
Advance Deduction	Use the ADVANCE deduction to calculate and deduct advance repayment amounts from an employee's pay	Fit
Provident fund for employees	Use to calculate the employee's provident fund contribution.	Fit
provident fund contribution by employers	Use to calculate the employee's voluntary provident fund contribution.	Fit
Employee state insurance		Fit
Employee State Insurance Employer Contribution (gc)		Fit
Tax deduction at source.		Fit
Labour Welfare Fund	This is different for diferent states	fit
Reimbursements
LTA		fit
Medical allowances		fit
Other allowances		gap	needs to be configured as per the organisations requirement
Payment during various conditions
Termination		fit
Absence	absences are tracked using absence management and the payment is made depending on the proceesing rule aatached for the employee	fit
Process tax and insurance deductions for employers and employees	Dependins on the calculations set in the processing rules	fit
off cycle processing	depending upon the requirement off cycle payroll process is run . For eg when the employee gets terminated.	fit
Absence Rules	Can be configured according to the requirement .The base tables and calculation rules will be set up accordingly and is done using absence management module	fit
Calendars	Can be configured according to the requirement .	fit
Holiday schedule	Can be set up according to org requirement	fit
Employee grouping	Employee grouping is possible on various criteria	fit
Retroactive methods	forwarding retro and corrective retro are delivered	fit
Benefits	Employee benefits and dependary data comes from base benefit module	fit
Security	delivered roles are available for payroll administartor, hr administartor,health &  safety administrator	fit
Process list	Various Process lists are delivered for processing absence, bonus and payroll .The calculation rules are defined here	fit
Banking
Basic banking set up	to set up basic bank information, bank branch information,source bank account ,	fit
Setting up accounts	To set up account foreach employeee of the org	fit
Electronic fund transfer file(EFT)	generation of  electronic funds transfer (EFT) files and reports are delivered process	fit
Payslips
Payslips templates	These can be configured as how the display should be as per the org's requirement	fit
Managing year end Processing
Reporting forms	various reporting forms are  delivered and year end reports are generated based on this	fit
Form 3A.
Form 5.
Form 6.
Form 7.
Form 12BA.
Form 16.
Form 24.
Form 24Q e-filing.

Report Name	Description	fit
Profession Tax	Calculates and reports on profession taxes	fit
NEW ESI ENROLLMENT (new employee state insurance enrollment)	Generates a list of employees enrolled in employee state insurance (ESI).	fit
List Of Employees Terminated From ESI (list of employees terminated from employee state insurance)	Generates a list of employees terminated from ESI.	fit
NEW PF ENROLLMENT (new provident fund enrollment)	Generates a list of employees enrolled in provident funds.	fit
List Of Employees Terminated From PF (list of employees terminated from provident fund)	Generates a list of employees terminated from provident funds.	fit
ESI Remittance (employee state insurance remittance)	Generates ESI remittance statement reports.	fit
PF Remittance (provident fund remittance)	Generates provident fund remittance statement reports.	fit
List of Taxable Medical Amount of Employees	Calculates and reports on medical allowance taxable amounts.	fit
List of Taxable LTA Amount of Employees (list of taxable leave travel allowance amount of employees)	Calculates and reports on leave travel allowance taxable amounts.	fit
Form 24 (Income Tax)	Generates details of all payments made to the employees, and the deductions and remittances made by the employer on behalf of the employee for the preceding financial year.	fit
Form No. 24Q	Generates details of all payments made to employees, and TDS deductions and remittances made by the employer on behalf of the employee for the preceding quarter. Generates TDS tax data files for electronic submission.	fit
Form 16 (Income Tax)	Generates Form 16 income tax data at the end of the year or upon employee termination. Generates required annual statements of remuneration paid to the employee and the taxes deducted from the employee and remitted to the tax authorities for the preceding financial year. One statement per employee is generated.	fit
Form 12BA Data	Generates Form 12BA for every employee who has been paid taxable perquisites or profits in lieu of salary. Accompanies Form 16, Form 24, or both.	fit
Form 3A Data	Generates Form 3A to provide details of employee provident fund contributions for the previous year. Accompanies Form 6A.	fit
Form 6A Data	Generates Form 6A to provide details of employee provident fund contributions for the previous year. Accompanies Form 3A.	fit
Form 6 Data	Generates Form 6 biannually to report employer contributions to the Employee State Insurance Corporation.	fit
Form 5 Data	Generates Form 5 to report details of contributions and remittances of professional tax.	fit
ESI Form 7	Generates Form 7 to provide half-year reporting of consolidated employer and employee insurance contributions, by month.	fit
LWF Form A	Generates LWF registration information.	fit