Transforming how NZ educators get paid with SAFe training, QA, & Testing.
SECTOR / INDUSTRY
CAPABILITIES FEATURED
CASE STUDY PDF
OVERVIEW
Over a multi-year engagement, Assurity Consulting has supported Education Payroll Limited (EPL) in modernising its work processes, helping to introduce Agile and DevOps practices and drive an increased focus on efficient testing. The engagement has equipped the organisation for rapid response to change, which, for its operations, is a constant. As a result, EPL smoothly, accurately and consistently executes payments for one of the largest payrolls in Australasia every two weeks.
KEY OUTCOMES
ABOUT THE CLIENT
Education Payroll Limited (EPL) is responsible for paying around 96,000 teachers and support staff in about 2,500 schools every fortnight, distributing approximately $242 million each pay period and $6.3 billion annually. The organisation has the Ministry of Education as its sole customer. In 2019, EPL started building a fully online payroll service for schools called EdPay – the future of schools’ payroll in New Zealand.
THE CHALLENGE
Aside from the sheer scale involved in delivering accurate pay packets to teachers and support staff every two weeks, EPL faces additional challenges, including the unusual way education personnel
are remunerated. Rather than the 40-hour work week or 52-week-a-year cycle familiar to most of us, teachers are paid on a 365-day basis.
A high degree of customisation of the payroll system is needed, explains EPL Chief Executive Arlene White. “There are 15 collective agreements (and 16 corresponding individual employment agreements) we must comply with, and no two are the same. There are also term-time only and annualised non-teacher employees to complicate things even further. We must also take into account annual leave and holiday pay, which are pro-rated and calculated against the 365- day calendar, and sick leave.”
This results in an estimated 70% customisation to the underlying software. “It’s a spaghetti junction, and the customisations, while crucial and necessary, make the similarly necessary, crucial and constant changes very challenging,” White adds.
The ongoing modernisation of the payroll process, which includes the introduction of the EdPay portal, is necessary for a simple reason. Previously, payroll was largely paper-based and prone to the shortcomings of manual processes – but at a vast scale.
“This meant processing change requests and tickets manually to make wage payments accurately.
We would receive up to 13,000 hand-written forms every fortnight and up to 1,000 phone calls a day, with hectic times at the start and end of the school year.”
“We recognised several years ago that there was a better way, and that led to a business case for a digital front end, where administrators and principals submit requests online. What we’ve built with EdPay will make nearly 90% of interactions non-paper based.”
She adds that, due to complexities, there will always be exceptions better handled using manual processes. However, these will see ‘lower level’ digitisation rather than the fully automated ‘straight through processing’.
OUR SOLUTION
Before and throughout the creation of EdPay, EPL has looked to Assurity for support in testing, shifting to Agile and DevOps Ways of Working, and more. This followed a 2016 agreement from the Ministry of Education to do a detailed business case including 21 operational and technology investments which would transform the payroll.
Initially, the execution was planned using the traditional waterfall approach. However, recognising the limitations of a ‘big bang’ approach to change, and in an environment where change is so frequent that the wholesale delivery of large change programmes is highly risky, a Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) was chosen.
EPL Quality Assurance Manager Frank Stubbe says that in short (and with the benefit of hindsight), waterfall simply would not have achieved the desired outcomes. “As the programme rolled out, we’ve had to adjust and refactor what we did regularly. We have also responded rapidly to changing priorities and circumstances, with the COVID lockdown as a case in point. Agile and DevOps have provided the flexibility to do just that.”
When EPL started with Agile and SAFe, it called on Assurity for expertise. “We also adopted a continuous improvement model, and Assurity was involved in multiple aspects, including testing and DevOps early on, and Agile coaching, guidance and Quality Assurance,” he explains.
RESULTS
For the administrators of probably the most complex payroll system in New Zealand, the biggest measure of success is invisibility. When the job is done well, nobody notices – pay arrives on time, accurately and consistently in employee’s bank accounts. That signals a step-change in EPL’s modern way of working, which Assurity has supported.
She singles out functional testing of complex systems as a case in point. This involved the smart application of automation and a new approach. “It’s something that’s hard to get your head around because we have to make changes to the core product constantly. Assurity’s teams collaborated with our coders to build tools that allow us to do that faster,” she explains.
The new approach, adds White, discarded the ‘traditionally’ adversarial relationship between developers and testers, with the disciplines working together as a team seeking a common outcome. “We see the Assurity and EPL cross-functional team sitting and working together to carry out the planning, testing and orchestration.”
The benefits of being able to work faster were huge, adds White. “Because with the relentless fortnightly pay cycle, time is of the essence, and there is never enough of it. The tools and expertise we’ve built with Assurity have given us the confidence to, for example, upload collective agreement changes within six weeks rather than the 12 it previously took. It is a miracle that we can do that – it’s phenomenal.”
Assurity’s ‘knowledge sharing’ approach has become particularly apparent as EPL builds internal capability around testing, Agile and DevOps practices. Rather than seeking to ring-fence their expertise, White says Assurity has provided support and made itself available with personnel on call as required.
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