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Introducing My Pay

By Brigid Palmer, OIT

Beginning in August 2009, the Office of the State Controller instituted the practice of paperless payroll advice.

State employees who use the Time and Attendance Management System (MS-TAMS) will be able to review their pay advice electronically. The Department of Administrative and Financial Services (DAFS) served as the pilot organization for My Pay. Electronic pay advice was available to DAFS employees for the Wednesday, August19 th payroll.

Providing the pilot is successful, other state agencies will be given access to My Pay during subsequent pay dates.

As part of legislation enacted during FY2008 (See State Controller's Bulletin FY08-05), the Office of the State Controller (OSC) urged state employees to sign up for direct deposit and go paperless.

A recent upgrade to the MFASIS/HR payroll system allowed for enhanced advice data to be captured. The vendor software delivered eAdvice functionality, only to find that it was incompatible with some state hardware and software components. OIT and OSC decided on an in-house custom enhancement to MS-TAMS.

OIT employed a Rapid Application Development/Joint Application Development (RAD/JAD) philosophy to go from application design to code delivery of My Pay Phase I in 9 weeks.

The My Pay development team consisted of George Willard (Systems Consultant), Brigid Palmer (Systems Analyst) and two Senior Programmer Analysts, Robert Simard and Emile Pinard. For maximum traction, the Sr. P/A's were borrowed from other teams because they were involved in the development of the original MS-TAMS system.

The OIT development team was co-located with OSC at the Cross Office Building , which allowed for brief stand-up meetings to resolve design and testing questions. OSC received rapid prototypes of the enhancements and developed training documentation in parallel with the coding effort.

In addition to the cost savings realized from reduced paper stock and postage, the implementation of My Pay will:

  • save administration time delivering and distributing pay advices
  • provide more advice history than the last 3 advices shown in Employee Self Service (current plans are to show 16 months of pay)
  • provide year-to-date values as of the respective pay date
  • make use of MS-TAMS global messaging capability
  • be accessible 24 hours a day/7 days a week
  • allow for immediate and incremental deployment (as well as back out, if needed) due to the centralized, parameter-driven security function
  • allow employees access to electronic pay advice, even if they do not use TAMS to enter their timesheet data

* Plans for My Pay Phase II include the following enhancements:

  • allow for Mac users to access MS-TAMS
  • remove the Internet Explorer browser constraint

This joint effort was seen as a positive experience by both the development team and their business customer. Both groups shared a stake in, and gained satisfaction from, designing and implementing the final product. In addition, state employees are gaining a secure and convenient way to access their pay information and are continuing to contribute to the cost savings measures across state government.

If you are a DAFS employee and would like to view My Pay, log on to MS-TAMS and click on the My Pay link.

Article posted on: October 1, 2009
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