Payroll go-live,we have a problem

IN Partnership with

Technology failures rarely start at launch. They start months earlier, in decisions about readiness, training and unintentional changes that nobody thought to double-check

IN OCTOBER 1968, technicians at a California engineering facility accidentally dropped an oxygen tank destined for a NASA spacecraft by about two inches. Eighteen months later, that same tank exploded 200,000 miles from Earth aboard Apollo 13. In July 2026, Sydney Water switched to a new payroll system – and effectively blew up both employee trust and the company’s reputation for effective risk management. While the second incident happened in a bland Sydney office rather than halfway to the moon, the two accidents have a lot in common. “Technology projects fail long before go-live. They fail when readiness is assumed, when managers are not equipped to lead change, and when organisations underestimate the behavioural shift required,” says Kim Boyd, national sales and marketing manager at Frontier Software. Like Apollo 13, the consequences are rarely abstract. A failed CRM system might frustrate a sales team for a quarter. A failed payroll system can leave people unable to meet a mortgage repayment or pay for childcare in the same week. That is what turns a project risk into a people risk, an operational risk and eventually a reputational one. When a system determines whether staff are paid correctly and on time, the usual language of project delays and phased rollouts stops being adequate.

Frontier Software helps organisations simplify the way they manage people, payroll and workforce operations. Established in 1983, Frontier Software supports organisations across the employee lifecycle through its ichris human capital management platform, a global delivery team, and payroll capability in 26 countries. With a long-standing commitment to innovation, service excellence, and customer success, Frontier Software enables organisations to improve efficiency, strengthen compliance, and create better experiences for employees and managers alike.

Find out more

“Technology projects fail long before go-live. They fail when readiness is assumed, when managers are not equipped to lead change and when organisations underestimate the behavioural shift required”

Kim Boyd, Frontier Software

Sydney Water employees reported underpayments, late payments and overpayments in the weeks following the switch, with some speaking publicly about the effect on their ability to cover mortgages, rent and family expenses. Questions were also raised about the adequacy of training and testing in the lead-up to go-live, precisely the kind of readiness gap Boyd describes. Boyd puts the boardroom stakes plainly. “Boards are increasingly recognising that implementation risk is business risk. If employees are not paid correctly, customers cannot be served or critical processes stop working. This is no longer an IT issue,” she says.

Record spending on technology The Sydney Water episode comes as Australian organisations ramp up spending on technology to new levels amid a rush of digital transformation plans and efforts to implement AI solutions. Gartner forecasts Australian organisations will spend $172.3 billion on technology this year, an 8.9% increase from 2025. Software spending alone is projected to rise 13.6% to become the country’s largest IT spending category, overtaking IT services for the first time. A surprising amount of that money will be judged not by the software that gets switched on, but by how well the people using it cope with the switch. Digital transformation, AI adoption, payroll modernisation and workforce platforms have become some of the largest line items on the corporate budget.

For years, technology implementation sat comfortably inside the IT department’s remit. That is changing. Executives are increasingly treating rollout risk as a business risk, one that touches business continuity, compliance, workforce trust, wellbeing and employer brand all at once. The question boards are asking has shifted. It is no longer simply, “Can we implement the technology?” It is closer to, “Can we move thousands of people and processes onto a new way of working without disrupting the business that depends on them?” When software works but people don’t Boyd has watched this shift play out across a long list of organisations moving between systems. The pattern, she says, is remarkably consistent. “One of the biggest misconceptions in digital transformation is that technology is the hardest part. In our experience, technology is usually the easier part. The challenge is helping people understand, trust and adopt a new way of working,” she says. Martin Barlow, national professional services manager at Frontier Software, measures success differently to how most project teams define it. “Successful implementation is not measured by whether a system goes live. It is measured by whether the organisation is ready to operate effectively the day after go-live,” Barlow explains. That distinction matters for anyone approving a transformation budget. Boards keep signing off on functionality, integration and configuration, while the factors that actually determine whether a project succeeds sit somewhere else entirely: leadership alignment, stakeholder engagement, process redesign, data quality, manager readiness and the organisation’s underlying capacity to absorb change.

Technology rarely breaks the project Organisations arriving at Frontier Software after a rocky implementation elsewhere rarely describe a technical failure. Boyd’s team hears something else entirely. “When organisations come to Frontier Software after a difficult implementation elsewhere, we rarely hear complaints about screens and buttons. We hear stories about poor communication, unclear ownership, inadequate training and employees who never fully understood why the change was happening,” she says. Barlow sees the same split between where organisations spend their attention and where the real risk sits. “The projects that succeed invest heavily in governance, testing, stakeholder engagement and adoption. The projects that struggle are often focused almost entirely on configuration and timelines,” says Barlow.

“The question organisations should ask before every major transformation is simple: Are we implementing technology, or are we transforming how our people work? Because those require very different strategies”

Martin Barlow, Frontier Software

Australia’s change management shortfall Common root causes of failed implementations tend to repeat themselves across industries: weak sponsorship, insufficient stakeholder engagement, poor communication, limited testing, inadequate training, and governance that has not kept pace with the scale of the change. Many Australian organisations continue to spend heavily on the technology itself while underfunding the people side of the equation, change specialists, manager enablement, workforce communications, readiness assessments and adoption measurement.

AI is speeding up the risk The arrival of AI, automation and next-generation workforce systems has added urgency to all of this. Change is now moving faster than many organisations can redesign the processes, governance and workforce capability required to support it, widening the gap between what leadership wants to achieve and what the organisation is actually ready to handle. Barlow argues the starting question for any major transformation needs to change before the project itself begins. “The question organisations should ask before every major transformation is simple: Are we implementing technology, or are we transforming how our people work? Because those require very different strategies,” he says. For HR directors sitting across the table from a technology vendor, the real due diligence question is not what the software can do, but whether the organisation is ready to change alongside it. The oxygen tank that failed on Apollo 13 didn’t develop a fault on the day it exploded. The disaster began the day a seemingly insignificant drop, barely the height of a golf ball, went unchecked.

Published 7 Sep 2026

Global research backs up how much that underinvestment costs. Change management firm Prosci has found that projects with excellent change management met or exceeded their objectives 88% of the time, compared with just 13% for projects where change management was poor or absent. Organisations with excellent change management, its research suggests, are up to seven times more likely to achieve change success than those without it. Barlow argues that what gets labelled ‘change management’ is often something much thinner. “Change management is not a communications plan. It is a disciplined approach to preparing people, managers and leaders for a different way of working,” he adds. The result is a project that can look, on paper, like a technical success. The system goes live, the integrations work, the timeline holds. And yet the organisation still fails to get the business outcomes it set out to achieve, because the people expected to use the new system day to day were never properly brought along.

Source: Gartner (Sep 2025)

Australian companies ramping up tech spending, 2025-2026

88% of the time

Projects with excellent change management met or exceeded their objectives

The change management payoff

13% of the time

Projects with poor change management met their objectives only

7 times more likely

Organisations with excellent change management are up to

to achieve change success

Source: Prosci, Best Practices in Change Management, 12th edition (2023)

50,000

100,000

150,000

200,000

Spending ($m)

Choose an option

8,219

10,071

Growth (%)

15,385

16,406

52,768

59,945

55,688

58,782

26,112

27,061

158,172

172,265

Data centre systems

Overall IT

Devices

Software

IT services

Communication services

Overall IT

Communication services

IT services

Software

Devices

Data centre systems

2025

2026

7.4

8.9

3.7

3.6

3.8

5.6

11.3

13.6

7.4

6.6

22.5