Introduction
Novopay a new IT school payroll processing programme was introduced by the Ministry of Education (MOE) New Zealand on 20 August 2012 to upgrade the old payroll system. It was implemented to around 110,000 MOE employees which included teachers and support staff both at state and state-integrated schools throughout the country. This replacement process had been in development since 2003. Unfortunately Novopay has been plagued with ongoing problems from the outset resulting in over-payment, underpayment and non-payment of a significant portion of MOE staff as well as ongoing inaccuracies with the payroll system. Nearly three quarters of New Zealand schools have been adversely affected.
The New Zealand Principal’s Federation president Paul Drummond stated “We are trying to do the impossible in an environment that is intolerable with a system that is dysfunctional . . . it is simply unprofessional and unacceptable” ( ). Eight months after the implementation of Novopay an investigation was undertaken by the New Zealand government to address fixing over 8,000 glitches in the system. Causes of the failure of this system have been numerous throughout the design, implementation and oversight stages of the project. The breakdowns within many layers of the working relationships for example between the Ministry and Talent 2 and the Ministry and the schools that were critical for the success of this project are outlined in the Ministerial Inquiry undertaken in 2013. I will discuss three of these causes of failure in more detail linking them to the Systems Development Life Cycle ( Diagram, p.612 ).

Poor Initial Consultation
According to the “Systems Analysis” phase of the Systems Development Life Cycle many errors were made in determining the scope of the project. “There was little direct customer (boards of trustees) or user