A procurement system developed for Workforce Australia was incomplete at the time it was needed, with failed saves and slow logins leading assessors to do their work in Microsoft Word first, before copying it across.
An audit report, tabled Monday, covers build delays with the Procurement and Licence Management System (PaLMS).
PaLMS was one of the three “foundational elements” of a digital platform built to support Workforce Australia (formerly known as the new employment services model or NESM).
Workforce Australia altered the way outsourced job services were provided on behalf of the federal government.
Rather than the previous model where all job seekers needed to meet with an agency, now only “higher-risk job seekers” do – the rest are considered “job ready” and can self-serve via a digital portal.
The first tranche of digital works, funded with $295.9 million in October 2020, covered base web and mobile apps, messaging and a “digital services contact centre”.
Also funded was a new “end-to-end procurement and contract management solution to replace the [Department of Employment and Workplace Relations’] current systems.”
PaLMS, as the system came to be known, was to be used to assess proposals from employment services agencies to serve the “high-risk job seekers” – or to join a panel to potentially be brought in later, should the need arise.
But PaLMS was not ready when it came time to assess the agencies’ proposals to join the panel, the audit notes.
Advice to government ministers on the delivery timeframe for PaLMS was “optimistic”.
The system was meant to have been built and made operational through the first half of 2021, however it was still unfinished nine months later, with a “senior responsible officer for the digital platform” saying “the front end, and the connection in the middle of the end-to-end capability, had not been built.”
The lack of middleware connections between the different parts of PaLMS – and its general usability – was acutely felt by assessors.
They encountered missing details, requiring multiple browser exits and re-entries; failed saves; a “back” function that did not work; and a daily login time of “between 20 to 40 minutes”.
“To work around these issues, Microsoft Word was used first before pasting results into PaLMS,” the audit states.
“This approach reduced the probity, efficiency and security benefits to be gained from using PaLMS.”
Work on codifying how assessors would rate proposals was performed concurrently with user acceptance testing (UAT), and continued after the testing finished.
“Therefore, the department’s ability to fix any system issues or analyse any unintended effects on the assessment process or outcomes was limited,” the audit noted.
Still, in spite of the IT issues, the department managed to assemble a panel that was judged by auditors to be “largely effective”.
The department agreed to an audit recommendation to ensure “evaluation processes are sufficiently developed prior to the release of tender documentation and testing that new IT systems are fit-for-purpose before implementation.”
Its response indicated that outside factors led to the truncated timeframe and the system not being ready on time.
“The department agrees it is best-practice for evaluation processes to be developed prior to release of approaches to market, including testing of IT systems for fit-for-purpose status, and will seek to influence decisions of government regarding resourcing and timeframes impacting on these matters,” it is quoted as saying.
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