Colorado Department of Personnel & Administration

Payroll Modernization Newsletter - February 2024

Colorado Department of Personnel & Administration sent this bulletin at 02/12/2024 08:49 AM MST

PAYROLL MODERNIZATION NEWSLETTER

FEBRUARY 2024

2023 Year In Review

Many great things happened last year as the Project progressed forward. Here are some highlights:

Procurement

The State issued an Invitation to Negotiate (ITN) to procure the new statewide payroll system in January 2023. This procurement process is similar to a Request for Proposal (RFP), but it allows for more negotiation and dialogue with offerors throughout the process. The ITN includes payroll scenarios developed with agency partners and Gartner Solutions in October 2022. The ITN evaluation process includes:

Vendor demonstrations
Testing of software by agency HR, payroll and finance professionals for functionality and accessibility
Usability assessment by Colorado Digital Service

Product demonstrations were held in May 2023 and a Vendor Bake Off facilitated by Colorado Digital Service was held in August 2023. Agency payroll, HR and finance professionals, DPA, OIT and CDS evaluators participated in the Bake Off.

Negotiation teams began engaging the top tier vendors in the fall of 2023 and this work continues.

Payroll Data as a Product

Vendor partner AdHoc was contracted to the Payroll Implementation Team in early 2023. AdHoc is supporting the Payroll Implementation Team with data profiling, creation of data journey maps and user personas, creation of a data catalog and glossary, and interface and integration research. AdHoc is supporting data liberation work with the creation of a data lakehouse for future State analytic use. AdHoc also worked parallel to an OIT team preparing data for the Step Pay Program.

Three OIT Data Architects are assigned to the Payroll Implementation Team. These are dedicated State resources working on data sourcing and profiling using Informatica as a tool in the validation of current system data. This team also is dissecting current system interfaces and integrations to ensure a seamless transfer to the new system.

Staffing

The Payroll Implementation Team became more robust in 2023. The Product Team added a Deputy and an Associate Product Owner and the Product Team represents over 20 years of service in state and local governments, experience in state agency payroll units, experience with large-scale system implementation, and experience profiling and exposing complex data elements.

As mentioned in the Data as a Product review, three data architects joined the Payroll Implementation Team in 2023. This team is housed in OIT and focused solely on the Payroll System Modernization Project. This team has extensive state government technical experience, representing success working with Colorado state agencies like CDPHE and CDOC and many high-profile private sector clients.

2023 also saw needed growth on the Central Payroll Unit team. New positions were added to the team including:

Payroll Compliance and Operations Manager
Statewide Time and Leave Manager
Statewide Payroll, HR and Time and Leave Trainer

In addition to being resources to the Payroll Implementation Team, these positions will provide support to the CPU team as well as agency and department partners across the state.

Agency Engagement and Change Management

The agency partners for this project include:

All three branches of Colorado state government - Executive, Judicial, Legislative
22 agencies and offices in the Governor's cabinet
Governor's Office including the Office of the Governor, Office of the Lieutenant Governor, Office of Information Technology, Colorado Energy Office, Office of Economic Development and Trade, and the Office of State Planning and Budget
Elected Executive Branch offices - Secretary of State, Department of the Treasury, Attorney General's Office / Department of Law
HR, payroll and finance professionals representing nearly 37,000 State of Colorado employees

Payroll System Modernization Project Office Hours began in April 2023 and will continue for the duration of system implementation. Held biweekly on Fridays, nearly 200 stakeholders participated in these 30 min sessions throughout 2023.

The Payroll Implementation Team embarked on an Agency Payroll Tour in the second half of 2023 which followed the series of Agency Listening Tours from the fall of 2022. Over 100 payroll, HR and finance professionals welcomed the PIT to their workspaces and engaged in frank and honest discussions about agency resources, data concerns and other topics:

Additional opportunities for agency participation in 2023 included:

Interviews about the current payroll landscape
SME interviews about Payroll Data
Discussions with COWINS
Payroll task demos with SMEs
Discussions about future data warehouse
System requirement discussions

The Payroll Implementation Team also sent a series of surveys to stakeholders in 2023 with questions related to the understanding of the current state of payroll data, understanding and use of a data dictionary for payroll data, and the understanding and current state of payroll system training and resources.

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Upcoming Data Work

The Payroll Implementation Team has been working to understand and profile the payroll data in the current system for some time. Accessing data on a mainframe-hosted, 40-year-old system is quite complex and complicated. The PIT has been working with vendor partner AdHoc for several months in this process. The AdHoc team is helping the PIT locate key data elements, profile the data elements and measure the completeness, validity, and accuracy of the elements, and liberate the data for use outside the current system.

Using learnings from the previous project, the PIT will be engaging agency HR and payroll partners to participate in a process to further assess concerning data elements, validating or correcting as needed. We have heard feedback and concern from our agency partners about the way this work was handled in the previous project and are working to mitigate those concerns in this project.

The details of this work are still being decided. The PIT wants to ensure the ask to our agency partners is necessary, appropriate and manageable knowing many HR and payroll professionals have other critical and time sensitive tasks already. More information about this will be communicated in the very near future.

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We Need Your Help

Through the Payroll System Modernization Project, the Payroll Implementation Team is working to create a system that meets the current needs of our agency partners and stakeholders as well as the short- and long-term future needs of these groups. While most of the functionality of CPPS will be decommissioned, we are looking for help in branding/naming the new system.

CPPS is the Colorado Payroll and Personnel System and the new modern system should reflect the vision and values of the teams of people who will be using it daily.

Here’s where you can help. Between February 12th and February 19th, the Payroll Implementation Team will accept ideas from you, our stakeholders, for the name of the new payroll system. Keeping in mind that all submissions will be considered, they also must be professional and appropriate.

What do you get for your creative work? The author of the chosen submission will not only receive bragging rights for naming what could be the most critical system in the State’s technology ecosystem, they will also receive recognition (unless they indicate a desire to opt out) and get a fun prize.

Please email your ideas to jeffrey.grossaint@state.co.us. We very much look forward to reviewing your awesome and creative submissions. Thank you in advance for your help!

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Riddle

The first five correct answers will receive a prize! Riddle me this:

What belongs to me but other people use it more than I do?

Please email jeffrey.grossaint@state.co.us with your answers. The correct answer and winners list will be published in next month’s newsletter.

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