What would you consider to be your main area of expertise?
I’ve probably covered just about every area of PeopleSoft technically in some way or another, but at the moment I prefer the Global Payroll technical work. Unfortunately I don’t get the chance to do as much of the hands on stuff as I used to.

What project have you most enjoyed working on and why?
It would have to be the design and development of Time and Attendance module for PeopleSoft in Australia. This was first started before the PeopleSoft Time and Labour module was thought of in the US. Boon and I were given a very simple requirement, “Build a customisation to load time clock or time sheet information into to PeopleSoft so that employees could be paid based on time worked”. It looked relatively easy to start with, but once we started to look into the effects of public holidays, swapped shifts, overtime, meal allowances, union agreements, sick days, late penalties and all of the other calculations related directly to the times worked, this grew into an entirely new module. The first version took around 8 months to build and was pretty flexible, unfortunately there were still some issues, specifically that we didn’t cover much on the retrospective processing side, and the time it took to process, even for small batches of employees, was prohibitive.

About 18 Months after the first version, I was given the task of doing a re-write of the entire module to fix some of the problems with the first version as well as adding in a heap more functionality. With Nino really helping with the initial design and a team of up to 10 developers helping, this was a much larger project that the first version. My favourite bit was that I got to re-write the rules engine from scratch, which ended up being the largest SQR program delivered by PeopleSoft. It used all 20 arrays for memory based caches of the rules and employee tables including indexing, sorting and predictive memory reallocation. In addition to this virtually every character available for code in that version of SQR was used. The challenge was enormous, but the success of the final product made it all worthwhile. Even though Time and Attendance was first built on PeopleTools Version 3, it is still being used in the live payroll of a number of clients in the Asia/Pacific region.

What is the most interesting customisation that you have delivered or seen in PeopleSoft?
I have seen and built heaps of really interesting things over the years. These include:

• The Manager Approval system for F.I. Group (now Xansa) allowed managers to enter in any job related changes and then the correct approvals required for the requested change would be determined and Workflow would be used to route the request to the correct managers, with the approved request finally being inserted into the employee’s job record.
  
  

• The SQRXLS tool. Allowing SQR programs to output to formatted Excel spreadsheets. It is great for users to be able to manipulate their report output in Excel and the use of the tool greatly reduces the difficulty of outputting and formatting the results as well as reducing maintenance.
  
  

• The Bulk Recruitment module for BSkyB. This allowed applicants to be rated and ranked though a number of questions on their first phone call, then for those that passed a pre-defined score, have further interviews scheduled based on their location, interviewer availability and available time slots. This was built to allow BSkyB to perform large scale recruitments for their call centres, sometimes in excess of 1,000 positions which could have over 5,000 applicants.
  

Overall though, I would have to say that the design and development of the Time and Attendance module used by PeopleSoft in the Asia/Pacific region as a replacement of the US Time and Labour Module would have to be the most interesting. This was mainly because of the inherent complexity of writing a module that could work for any organisation’s business processes for converting the hours worked by a shift employee into a list of payment amounts.

What would you most like added to the PeopleSoft product?
There are a few things that spring to mind. Firstly it would be great if PeopleSoft had the help screens embedded in the database and editable. It always seems to be difficult for clients to get a comprehensive and consolidated user help system set up that covers both PeopleSoft delivered functionality and client specific configuration and customisations. It would be great if the HTML PeopleBooks were actually stored with each page in the database. Then these could be updated as part of the development cycle.

Secondly a consolidated reporting solution would be useful; basically a way of using SQR like printing commands out of Application Engine PeopleCode would be nice. I have heard that this is in the pipeline for tools release nine, so I will keep my fingers crossed.

What is the most frustrating thing about the PeopleSoft product?
The number of clients that don’t get the most of out the product. There is just so much benefit that can be gained from the product, and in many cases it is ongoing development of new reports and valued added functionality that adds the most business benefit at the least cost to the client. However many companies leave the application to only the initial implementation and occasional upgrades, and therefore focus less on what is best for the business and more on just getting and keeping the application running.

What originally drew you to consulting or the computing field?
My grandfather was an early FORTRAN programmer and when I didn’t really know what I wanted to do at University, I thought that I would give computing a try in a general science first year. I loved it straight away; programming for me was a great creative outlet. You start with nothing and get to build something that performs a task, and it is totally up to you how it does it. I especially enjoyed the more human side of computing including graphical user interfaces and artificial intelligence. Unfortunately most of the work in these fields was academic and the business was with databases. Fortunately for me though, I was in the right place at the right time and went straight into PeopleSoft consulting as PeopleSoft was starting up in Australia. I ended up being the second consultant in the country and did most of my training as part of the PeopleSoft development team… What a start!

What advice would you give to a new client starting with PeopleSoft?
PeopleSoft can be used a database to store corporate details or a tool supporting and enhancing a company’s business processes. One of these options provides a good return on investment, empowers users and even encourages future enhancements. The other turns into an expense to the business with little management and user involvement or business benefit.

As a client you are paying a lot of money for this application, so don’t just view it as an I.T. task that needs to be performed. Look at it as a tool to support management and users that can grow as the requirements of the business progress. Enhancements performed after the initial implementation are more likely to have a positive return on investment.

Why did you join Congruent?
Although I really enjoyed my first PeopleSoft consulting job with Pacific Technology in Australia, I was very disappointed when I was told that I would have to move to either functional or management work to progress my career. I felt that I was a good technical consultant and I really wanted to continue to specialise in this area, rather than have to move into areas which I wasn’t trained for and didn’t enjoy as much. I joined up with Nino and Boon to start Congruent based on the idea of a consulting company run by consultants and for consultants with reduced management overhead and the ability to specialise rather than have to move into management. Now I end up spending most of my time managing the company rather than doing technical work… I wonder how that happened?

Where do you want to be in 5 years time?
It is going to be difficult to top the success as well as the challenges that I have had with Congruent in the last 5 years. Hopefully from here I will be able to consolidate on the position that I am in now, on the other hand I have always dreamt of setting up a small research and development company in Brisbane, Australia to investigate business applications of Artificial Intelligence concepts.

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