JPA teething trouble causes unrest in the ranks

Military management blames underestimation of cultural upheaval

The project is broadly successful, says the MoD

Problems with the armed forces’ £100m Joint Personnel Administration (JPA) system are down to training and cultural change issues rather than the technology itself, according to the military administration.

The JPA programme was designed to modernise human resources (HR) within the wider context of aims to “harmonise” the Army, Navy and RAF, creating a single source of management information and ensuring equivalent pay rates across the three services.

“We wanted to build on commercial software, to make as much as possible common across each service, and to drive out benefits by making the function more self-service, with a greater degree of automation and centralised support,” said Mike Robinson, head of the delivery unit for the Deputy Chief of Defence Staff – Personnel (DCDS (Pers)), which takes overall responsibility for HR issues in the armed forces.

But Computing has been deluged with complaints from service personnel and HR professionals, citing unpaid wages, confused allowances and difficulties in sorting out problems.

Both the DCDS (Pers) department and the Service Personnel and Veterans Agency (SPVA), which oversees the implementation of JPA, acknowledge there have been teething problems. But they maintain the programme is broadly successful.

JPA has already saved £100m and has cut the military’s HR workforce by 20 per cent – or 1,400 posts. It is also one of the largest Oracle payroll implementations in the world, with 220,000 active records.

“We are not underestimating the amount of effort that still needs to be put into making sure everybody understands the system, but from the departmental perspective JPA is going well,” said Robinson.

The problem is not that the technology does not work, say its backers. System supplier EDS is meeting its contractual obligations. And, according to the SPVA, 99.84 per cent of JPA calculations were correct in July; 99.9 per cent in August.

The issue is that the data being input for the calculation is not necessarily right. That is because the system’s customers – individual service personnel accessing self-service terminals and units’ HR professionals – are not using it properly.

Both of these groups maintain that the system is not user-friendly, and that training was grossly insufficient. In acknowledgement of early difficulties, the military’s management has revised training for HR professionals.

But staff resistance is also a factor, according to SPVA change director Ali Sansome.

“There is a large degree of cultural change and the extent of resistance to it was underestimated by everyone, particularly in a military culture where staff do as they are told,” she said.

“The reality is that it takes people a lot longer to become comfortable with such radical changes. We are certainly seeing that those people most familiar with the legacy systems are having the most difficulty in making the transition.”

Efforts were put in upfront but it was not until the system was fully live that the nature of users’ difficulties were revealed.

There is top-level awareness of the problems and full commitment to ensuring they are addressed, said Royal Navy Commander Simon Hardern, military assistant to DCDS (Pers) vice-admiral Wilkinson.

“We certainly do not have our heads in the sand – we recognise the frustrations and are being proactive,” he said.

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