And while the initial problems appeared to have largely subsided by mid-November, the lessons of last fall’s debacle will likely remain with administrators.

“Nobody wants to go through what happened this year,” Touborg said.

She said some of the blame for the malfunctions was due to uninformed students.

“We did a good job of informing employees of those changes. That was not true of the student population,” Touborg said. “That was a gap in our planning, and this year we hope to make up for that.”

The problems arose mostly with student and other temporary employees, especially with those who held multiple University jobs. The new system initially had difficulty handling students who worked more than one job.

Another problem was the large amount of data entry that was required to enter new employees into the database, often delaying the hiring of new employees. Many students were not entered into the system by the time their paydays came around.

As a result, the OHR plans to unveil a new “quick hire” form by the end of August, in time for the beginning of the fall semester. The systems will also be modified to update the database more frequently with new entries.

Further planned changes include online benefits processing and a system for entering paid time off.

Adapting to ADAPT

The HR Project was the second phase of a ten year plan to update Harvard’s financial systems.

The push for a new financial system started in 1993.

In 1994, Harvard kicked off the Adaptive Data Project, which involved about 400 University faculty and staff in an exhaustive review of data systems.

After prototype testing throughout 1995, the database company Oracle was chosen to design the software for the new systems.

In a phase known as Project ADAPT, the Oracle financial software was installed in 1999.

The first part of Project ADAPT was criticized for being “user-hostile,” and as administrators looked ahead to the next phase—the HR Project—they said they had learned their lesson: they would consult more with users and make the new systems more friendly.