This makes me feel good about my skills at judging up front how long a project is going to take: University of Wisconsin is $40 million in the hole and not much nearer to patching their legacy payroll system. That's ridiculous, but this stuff is hard. Each individual piece is easy, sure, but when you try to put them all together you quickly move into unexpected territory.

A first attempt to replace it with Lawson Software was scrapped in 2006 after years of work and a cost of $28.4 million. The project, a public relations embarrassment for the university, was doomed by poor project leadership and planning, bureaucratic infighting and technical complexity.

The university started planning for a second attempt in 2007, this time using Oracle's PeopleSoft system.

Giroux said earlier planning budget estimates and timelines had to be changed because "we did not have the full picture of how complex this project would be."