130: Rigged bids, fake deadlines, and going 181x over budget

A $6.9 million estimate. A $1.25 billion catastrophe. How fake deadlines, a rigged bid, and a steering committee allergic to bad news turned a routine payroll migration into one of the biggest project disasters in Australian history.

What happens when project leadership treats risk management as optional, decision making gets diffused across committees, and a hard deadline turns out to be completely negotiable? You get one of the most instructive project failure case studies in project management history — and in this episode, Kim and Kate pour it out one painful lesson at a time.

The subject is Queensland Health, the public healthcare provider for the Australian state of Queensland, employing roughly 85,000 people across about 300 sites. In 2005, their legacy payroll vendor gave them three years' notice: support ends June 30, 2008. Sounds like plenty of runway — until the organization waited two of those three years to act. By the time a consultant named Terry Burns (remember that name) ran the procurement and IBM signed a contract in December 2007, the original $6.9 million estimate had ballooned to a $98 million contract with just six months to deliver a system covering more than 24,000 unique payroll combinations.

Why does this matter for project managers and leaders? Because almost nothing that went wrong here is exotic. Late project intake. Governance where a transition team, a steering committee, and an IT department all had partial authority but no single decision-making structure. Two weeks — total — for requirements gathering on a nine-figure program. A "lift and shift" strategy that preserved every broken process and demanded 2,500 custom software configurations to replicate them. As Kim and Kate walk through it, the episode becomes a masterclass in how ordinary project management failures compound into organizational catastrophe.

The discussion highlights are equal parts horrifying and hilarious. There's the program's actual internal slogan, taken straight from the project materials: "Plan A or Die" — no continuity plan, no risk mitigation, no fallback. There's the June 2008 deadline that came and went with a simple change request and some extended support from the legacy vendor, prompting Kate's sharp observation that the date was fake and not fake at once: end-of-life risk is real even when the cliff turns out to be movable. There's the UAT phase in June 2009 that surfaced 2,422 severe defects — after which the steering committee simply r