CourseForward Deployed Engineer: The Complete Course · Module 10: Stakeholders and Politics · part 60 of 85
Part 60 · Module 10: Stakeholders and Politics

Incident: The warning that never reached the decider

9 min read·13 Oct 2026
Module 10 · Incident file · About 35 minutes

What happened

QUEENSLAND HEALTH PAYROLL contract 5 Dec 2007 31 Jul 2008 due date memo held 6 Jul 2009 14 Mar 2010 go-live inquiry 31 Jul 2013 about 220 contract changes in between
Due in July 2008, the payroll went live in March 2010 after about 220 contract changes; the warning memo of July 2009 was held, not sent (red, failure).

In 2010 Queensland Health, the public health department of the Australian state of Queensland, switched on a new payroll system built by IBM, under a contract between the State and IBM that was run by CorpTech, a separate government technology agency. In 2013 a Commission of Inquiry led by the Honourable Richard Chesterman, a retired Court of Appeal judge, reported on what went wrong (Queensland Health Payroll System Commission of Inquiry, Report, 31 July 2013). The figures below are from that report, in Australian dollars.

The contract with IBM was signed on 5 December 2007, with the new payroll due by 31 July 2008. On 14 March 2010, "after ten aborted attempts", the system went live. The Commissioner calls it "a catastrophic failure": it caused "very many QH staff not to be paid, or to be paid inaccurately". The contract price of $6,194,932.98 rose to $25.7M in payments to IBM alone, through about 220 contract changes. Running the repaired system "required about 1,000 employees to process data in order to deliver fortnightly pays", at an estimated $1.2B over the following eight years. The report says it "may be the worst" failure of public administration in Australia.

paid to IBM, Australian dollars contract $6.19M paid $25.7M about 1,000 staff to process fortnightly pays about $1.2B over the next eight years
The contract (blue) was $6.19M; IBM was paid $25.7M, and running the repaired payroll needed about 1,000 staff and $1.2B over eight years (red).

This file is not about payroll software. It is about one finding the report returns to again and again: the people who could have stopped the project were never put in front of the facts, with options, in time.

The rest of this course is yours to keep

This course is bought on its own, once, and stays readable afterwards, including the parts added to it later.

Buy this course · ₹399See what is inside