Full implementation of Marin County’s new computer system is now set for Jan. 8 — more than three years later than initially planned.
“The good news is the ATOM project is ready for its final phase,” Steve Leckey, a consultant brought in to manage the project in April, told Marin County supervisors on Tuesday.
“I’m also happy to say that the project is under budget by about $3 million,” said Leckey, whose contract makes his services available to the county through Feb. 5 at a cost of $305,900.
But Angela Nicholson, an assistant Marin County administrator who oversaw the project for a time before Leckey, said the $3 million cost savings does not take into account all of the county staff time spent working on it.
Under the schedule announced on Tuesday, county employees will begin filling out their own timesheets online beginning Dec. 13, and the county will issue its first payroll checks using the system on Jan. 8.
Installation of the first phase of the new system began in February 2015 with the design of new finance software. That software went live on schedule in July 2016. Payroll and human resources components of the system were initially planned to go live in July 2017, but both have proved problematic.
Marin County budgeted $14 million for the project — dubbed “Administrative Technologies of Marin,” or ATOM. Of that amount, $8.2 million went to Tyler Technologies of Texas, the maker of the software. An additional $5.8 million was budgeted to cover the cost of having county staff install and learn to use the software.
The Tyler computer system is replacing a system purchased from SAP for $2.23 million in 2005. At the time, the county also signed a contract to pay Deloitte $8.8 million to oversee installation of the SAP software.
The system became so problematic and expensive to maintain, however, that officials abandoned it four years later. The county sued the vendors, alleging bribery and fraud, and spent $5 million on the litigation before settling the case for $3.9 million.
Liza Massey, the county’s chief information services officer, said the main reason the county has been able to keep the cost of the Tyler system installation down is that it signed a “not-to-exceed” contract with Tyler, not a “time and materials contract,” as it had with the previous system.
Nicholson, however, said Leckey’s estimate that the project is $3 million under budget leaves out the soft cost of staff time, which wasn’t tracked.
“There have been five to seven people working on the project full time since we began implementation,” Nicholson said.
Other estimates run even higher.
Massey said there has been a core team of 12 county employees working on the project since she joined the county in May 2018. On Tuesday, Leckey thanked a dozen county employees for their contribution to the project.
“Certainly an extensive number of staff hours has gone into the project,” Nicholson said. “It’s just that we didn’t hire extra people to backfill for them. Departments struggled with that. They had to figure out how to do their regular work with their employees on the ATOM project.”
Nicholson said the installation might have been completed earlier this year had it not been for the additional demands on staff time made by the COVID-19 health emergency.
Nicholson was assigned new emergency management duties when the COVID-19 health emergency hit, making it necessary to hire Leckey.
“Once COVID hit, there was no way I could do both,” she said.
Nicholson began overseeing the project after Tim Flanagan, the IT department’s enterprise systems manager, left for a job in Solano County in January 2019.
Nicholson said the biggest delay, however, was Tyler’s acquisition of Executime, a third-party vendor. The county’s contract with Tyler included a license with Executime for software that will allow county employees to fill out their time cards digitally. After Tyler acquired Executime in the summer of 2016, the Executime software had to be integrated with Tyler’s existing systems.
If the project goes live as scheduled in January, Leckey told supervisors the county can begin its next task, which will have to be completed by the end of 2021: upgrading the entire system.
“It’s a fair amount of work to do,” he said. “But trust me, it is nothing like your original implementation.”
(c)2020 The Marin Independent Journal (Novato, Calif.). Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
