From LA Weekly: the Los Angeles Unified School District attempted to roll all of its employees to a single payroll calendar. The conversion has been a disaster, as LAUSD managers failed to follow a basic tenet of information systems migration – parallel conversion. Keep running the old system running until the new system works!
It was January when the district’s new, $95 million payroll system started spewing out erroneous checks, underpaying some people, overpaying others, and creating such chaos that administrators now pay special counselors to deal with the psychological trauma.
The blunders persist despite $37.5 million in fix-it cash, and teachers are ratcheting up the pressure by boycotting faculty meetings and holding rallies. They marched on September 25 outside the LAUSD offices — “We won’t take it no more!” hundreds chanted…
Wikipedia’s article on parallel adoption is actually helpful, with a decent reference list of supporting articles. This concept is discussed in the IS 6100 textbook in chapter 12 on page 476. Both terms have similar meanings.
At the end of the day, employees expect an accurate paycheck
Parallel testing is all but required when a company moves large amounts of data processing to a new system. Developers rarely anticipate every possible exception that might affect a new information system.
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