From another thread.........
 

Maybe someone might want a word...

JPA
 

Well, Wingco whatsizface has been proved right so far I think. Logged on just now via DII and all the bits were working as promised, I'm not trying to PVR or rescind one so I'm impressed so far.

Wonder how long before it crashes, or will it be taken off of us again for the pay run this month?

Here as in many areas of this site there is a request to know who is responsible and the simple answer is many people but I am assured that the Senior Responsible Officer (SRO) on this project was DCDS(Pers) an RAF AM. So the decision was not purplel, the RAF could have declined but decided to get on with it. I am sure the RN and Army are eternally grateful

Things seemed to have improved today and could access most parts of the system. Still waiting for a response from the JPAC ref 2 expense claims though.
However, whilst I was waiting for JPAC to answer this morning I listened to the full range of musak inc 633 Sqn, Dambusters and then moved onto a selection of Bond soundtracks which got me thinking. What music would you expect or want to hear whilst you are waiting for JPAC to pick up the phone?
My starter for ten would be the theme tune from 'Mission Impossible'.

No Flying pay this month, together with 1100 others or so. Not paid fg pay with the later, 'catch-all' BACS payments in early May. Had to chase up on the JPA hotline, after 40 mins in queue they couldn't get my details up on their screen either and I was referred back to sqn Admin staff. Sweet.

After the initial pay F*ck up, about 800 people received a BACS payment to cover fg pay, and about 500 people were missed AGAIN. It's now up to individuals who missed the fg pay payment TWICE to make the necessary noise and chase it up as there 'isn't time' to see if everyone got paid.

Apparently specialist pay wasn't 'a priority' this month. Wish I could prioritise my mortgage payments!

It shouldn't matter. After all, I have the charter (sent to my home, unlike my pay statement) that says that they will answer the phone within 50 secs.:eek:

Day 12:

Still no flying pay, basic wrong, incorrect deductions, rank wrong, LSA wrong.

I was however able to access JPA today and view my pay statement (still no paper copy) but alas, I hadn't dreamt the above comments, it is all still wrong.

Oh, some kind HR dude/dudess has put my leave in for the end of the month bank holiday. Whoops, I'm on an exped then!! There's no facility to cancel it! More phone calls next week then. :ugh:

It seems that a batch of expense claims, including mine have been paid into cyberspace. They have been showing as paid for 11 days now but have not gone into bank accounts.

Helpdesk say that they were paid out by Centurion but it seems neither they or the people at Worthy Down are accepting that its their problem so we will just have to wait for our money.

Still can't put in an overseas next of kin - Query raised over a month ago.:ugh:

Still cant find anyone at the JPAC who can sort out the address to which they sent my pay statement.

I feel that there is a way to go yet before all is well with JPA

System may be working, but my missing pay also missed the mid-May pay run. Bread and water for the rest of this month!

Well, as pledged before, fair play to the fella, give him his due.

From what I've seen today (Friday afters 1630..........) it seemed to be working OK and at a reasonable speed too. Is there a Strike stand down today and I'm the only one who didn't know?

Shame about all the errors that still haven't been sorted yet. Will that be next Friday? Hope those affected have some success soon.

Jobza

I got my pay statement! - and my mate got his page 2 of 2 (alas, no page 1).

Now at least I know for sure that I didn't get my flying pay. Ironically enough - I flew over 100 hours last month.

As MilSpFunc says, and he should know as he went through the mud and the blood and the green fields beyond to tell you where the responsibility lies, it is one of your own and we are eternally grateful that 'cos we have no real DII that it cannot be done to us ...... yet.

Still it seems to be getting better (is that true?) and you all seem happily now able to carry out your own admin. So is it all that ends well ....?

RAF Takes Off With Joint Personnel Administration (JPA)
 

But it's all been a massive success...

http://www.raf.mod.uk/news/news_0605_08.html

....hasn't it?

** WARNING - For your keyboard's sake please put down your tea before opening the link. **

Thanks for the warning!!

I'm considerably out of pocket. I've seen the letter dated 2 May from the AMP stating that the flying pay would be paid that week, it wasn't. I've heard rumours it'll be paid in the May pay, JPAC couldn't confirm this. I don't know for sure when and if I'm getting my money, this month? next?

If anybody wants to play a tune for me on their violin, I'm staying in tonight as I can't afford to go out, and we know why that is!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

:mad: :mad: :mad: :mad: :mad: :mad: :mad:

Not convinced about admin computer systems but it would appear we've got world class bullsh!tters within our ranks...

If only they had an olympics...

I finally managed to book some leave on the JPA system yesterday and most of its features seem to be active. But in my opinion, there is still a lot of work to be done to JPA before it can be considered a success. The 2 most important issues that have to be fixed are:

The introduction of SSL security. The civil servants have it on their HRMS system, so why can't we have that level of security too?

The overall user unfriendliness of the system. No disrespect intended, but although the RAF may be able to cope with JPA, I dread to think what will happen when 100,000 Army troops try to use it. Anyone managed to update their next-of-kin details yet?

Leave Passes
 

I have a leave pass somewhere in my in tray. What do I do with it?

PN,

If it is your own leave pass then bin it, if it is one of your staff's then bin it and if you do not know who it belongs to then bin it.

You will be adding to the collective greater good and doing nice turn for the individual involved. I have attempted to generate leave passes on the system and have failed. Therefore, if my work does not really care where I am, why should I waste my time trying to tell them:ugh: :ugh:

ALWAYS assume NEVER check

Akula,

It was a semi-humourous rhetorical suggestion. I don't have a JPA password and it is not my leave pass.

Unfortunately I believe it was put on my desk last Tuesday and I am not going on leave myself until the end of the month. It is only on the last day of the month that I clear my in-tray and file things appropriately.

This means my tray will not be cleared until 30 June.

Brown Job says <<'cos we have no real DII that it cannot be done to us ...... yet.>>

Don't we know it. Enter everything into HRMS, print it out, mail it to HQ. at least our DII terminal came with a high speed printer.

Purple Navigator

JPA Music
 

Thie following is SUPPOSED to be my suggestion for the JPA "theme tune", but I fear the technology may be beyond me. Fingers crossed :)
http://melaman2.com/cartoons/looney/...tunes_end1.mp3

Edited to try to make the sodding thing work !

Nice One Dimmer!!!

'J' Bloke:cool:

Brain Potter

Thanks for that link. What a load of B***S**T. It really is a kick in the slats for the 'users'. Reminds me of that line from Blackadder:

found it here:

Blackadder Quote Site Well worth a visit!

That said, I did manage to get a claim in yesterday (SATURDAY!), it took over an hour and resulted in a violation because the £6 I claimed for London Underground (King's X to MoD and back) was above the allowed limit for a day. Bolleaux.

STH

Edited to correct my original version of the quote.

Sir Toppham, the solution is obvious. Travel as far as the money lasts and then stop over for the night.

Only last week we got a directive from DCINC to reduce RTAs. Although official vehicle rules prohibit you from travelling/working more than 11 hours and also mandate rest breaks w are now asked to observe similar rules for non-military vehicles.

So, if your meeting requires you to leave home at 7.30 for a meeting at 1000, the meeting lasts until 1600, you depart for home at 1630, at 1830 if you are not at home you should stop for the night.:}

If that does not work then try and get a driver. It will definitely work then.

Remember, if you try and play ball with then they will stuff the bat right up your ****

Pontius. Suggest you have a friendly chat with your MTO. We've been observing the regs for some years now - the MT chaps were directed to do it. I was enforcing the 'no more than 8 hrs driving in a 12 hr duty day' in 2001 and it wasn't new then.
OC Eng at the time changed his personal practices once we explained the result of fatigue to him (think Selby rail disaster). Whether you're driving an MT car, hire car or your own, you are still doing it for work, therefore on Duty.

Mr Chinecap, I am, in a manner of speaking, my MTO. The point I was making was not service driving but when you drive your own vehicle the rules do not apply.

This means that you can get up at o'christ hundred, drive like a maniac, do a day's work, skip tea, and drive like a maniac back to mother. Some of you will have accidents, some of these will involve fatalities.

DCINC has said that this is unacceptable and that private driving should conform to service rules. For instance if you are working all day Monday you would probably be unfit to proceed the night before and night stop prior to your meeting. Similarly after your meeting and rush home you are probably not out of rest until later the next day. The temptation of being in bed with Mrs C may outweigh your discretion and the pressure you are under to do the work task means you do a full day's work either side too. The hours just don't add up.

Years ago I tried to introduce a 'fixed' programme concept:

Monday 0900 Met Brief - 1000 mission planning, 1700 into crew rest, 0500 show time, airborne 0800, land 1300, debrief 1500 and stack. The programme for the 5 hour trip would automatically cover two days. No, slip in a sim, do orderly officer, war target study etc.

On Shacks we started with something like that:

Monday-Friday one crew on Ops, which meant a rest period for most of the crew.

One crew on QRA - at home at rest and so on.

As the task expanded, the manning shrank etc so the 'duty crew was used to back fill flying crews. The QRA crew was called in for light duties in the morning etc. Even when the QRA crew did a full morning's work and were stood-down to rest at home they were often called in and launched later in the evening clocking up some 16 hours face time.

As someone said earlier, most things are not important and some things do not matter at all. With our caring sharing air force you should make sure you get your share and take care of yourself. No one else will.

So how would that square with a crew RTBing after a 16hr crew duty day, involving crossing several time zones? Would they have to stay in the mess on landing? And if the mess was full, would Ops book you a hotel room downtown and provide transport?

DCINC has no authority to insist service rules apply to private driving, or private anything for that matter - the clue's in the name.

However, as the man who was responsible for the Selby rail crash found out, drive when you are tired and you will go to jail if you have an accident. In his case he alone was culpable because he spent the entire night before on an internet chat room. Should you be FORCED to drive after a 16 hour crew duty day then the RAF would also be culpable in the event of an RTA. I suspect it is this aspect that DCinC is driving at! :)

The driving thing has always been an issue - for people working the standard 2d 2n 1s 3o shift pattern, the tempation has always been to get a couple of hours shuteye on the 2nd night and then drive to relatives for the days off. It is extremely difficult to control and the argument that it is actually outside the Service control usually wins. However, I have seen people ordered not to drive following exercises and the like.

On the other hand, what we are seeing more of (and this has nothing to do with JPA) is people 'choosing' to use their own cars for duty journeys. This option might normally be turned down by the Boss because it is not the cheapest (eg when self-drive MT is available). However, the thing that swings it is the offset of the cost of accommodation because of the time limits on the use of MT. It is something which those of us in positions to influence need to be wary of.

Back to JPA. I have 2 Qs:

1. Are shift workers able to get the leave thing to work properly/fairly?

2. What are people doing about NoK? One of the complaints I have seen a lot of is the inability of people to correct NoK info which is wrong on the system - are unit commanders making separate arrangements? What is the PMOC using as the primary source of info?

Pip pip

STH

As the Gorilla says, if you are forced or indeed make the choice.

For instance if you land at a secret Wiltshire air base then they should prvide you with a get-you-home service or a put-you-up one. The problem now is that Mr TruckDriver would rather sleep with Mrs TruckDriver so they will offer the put-you-up option knowing full well . . .

If you insist on your rights, take the offered bed and then claim fatigue the next day because of disturbance etc you might just get the MT the next time.

Trouble is bat and ball every time. Yes indeed the hotac might have to be offered. The advice came in on an email about Thursday or Friday. try and track down a copy.

Good game :}

JPA Working Tomorrow?
 

Getting back to the Wg Cdr's claim that JPA will be fully up and running tomorrow ...

I tried several times today to log on to JPA, and it seems that the whole JPA website is off-line, not even the log in page was available.

Is JPA supposed to be available 24/7, or is it working week only ? Maybe they have taken the whole system down in order to correct all the problems with it by tomorrow morning so that someones credibility remains intact?

Or maybe the server is just down again? Guess I will find out tomorrow.

Y_G

This story made Private Eye! :}

Perhaps it will now filter out to the wider media, along with the hapless Wg Cdr's morale-enhancing contribution to the "debate" on JPA.

Good, hopefully it will make the Times shortly as well.....seeing as how the same journo mate of mine works for both publications.....I think I sent him some links by mistake.:O

Standby for Wg Cdr caveats. When he says "fully functional", I don't imagine for one minute you are going to get 100% functionality. You will get a reduced application set of core functions, the rest no doubt will be classed as non-essential.

So, was it fully finctional today?

I didn't get my flying pay yet...

Fully fictional, more like.....

Sorry to hear it is all going so badly.
Don't normally post in this area - IT questions are more my thing, but saw this thread linked from TheRegister, and thought I'd pass on my condolences. I used to work for EDS, until about 5 weeks ago, when we were all let out... Due to JPA being ready to 'take the strain'.
Ooops.
Left the country - well out of EDS' grasp now :>
Seriously, we met the support guys'n'gals who were taking over, and I'm sure they are doing their utmost to get things running at full speed.
Good luck.

Got my April pay statement today. Everythings correct. JPA is great.

Full Functionality my @rse
 

That pretty much covers it.

Now I only had 2 things to do on JPA this morning, sort out my Next of Kin data & enter my posting preferences, simple.

Granted, I have to say that the access speed this morning was quite good & I've finally been able to convince the system that Mrs M55 is indeed female & correct some of the other NoK info. However, posting prefs, not a chance.

The only part of the posting prefs that I was able to search was 'location', a post type list (i.e. Rearcrew on Kipper fleet) would be nice! Yes, I am a masochist, I know.

Still could be worse, the system could say it paid loads of wonga to me but not have received a penny in the bank (thankfully not me, but some poor soul I know).

I just found this on MOD Oracle.... http://www.modoracle.com

"RAF Takes Off With Joint Personnel Administration (JPA)

Monday, May 15, 2006

Source: RAF

On 20 March 06, the Armed Forces Personnel Administration Agency (AFPAA) successfully rolled out JPA to over 48,000 RAF Service personnel throughout the world on time and on budget. The event marked the culmination of five years system design, development, integration and testing and bears testimony to a very strong partnering arrangement between MOD and EDS.

The sheer scale and complexity of JPA should not be underestimated and from the very beginning, the joint project team has called on the experience and expertise of a range of military personnel and IT specialists. The project has involved the extraction of data from over 80 different legacy systems, cleaning it and transforming it into new requirements to load into a commercial Oracle HRMS system. For more than 48,000 RAF personnel, spread across the globe, this has amounted to over 3 million rows of data.

With any project of this complexity, even with extensive testing there will invariably be a small number of technical issues to overcome when the system goes live and JPA has been no exception. Although the system performed within satisfactory parameters on initial roll out to RAF professional HR administrators, once self service users were granted access, the sheer volume of the early transactions caused system performance to slow to unacceptable levels. Whilst still allowing full access to HR professionals and restricted access to self service users a number of fixes were made to the JPA system. These allowed the progressive introduction of additional functionality whilst providing core processes and maintaining acceptable system performance levels. As a result of this fine tuning, both HR professionals and self service users now have full access to the system with no degradation to the on line service.

A true measure of the JPA system would be its ability to run the very first pay roll. This was successfully achieved and bank payments were made to RAF personnel on 28 th April as planned. Where there have been a small number of minor discrepancies caused by the migration of data from the legacy system to JPA, these have already been rectified or will be in May's pay run. These were clearly ‘one off' start up issues that have now been addressed. Great efforts were made to ensure that the small number of individuals affected were not financially disadvantaged.

The introduction of JPA to the RAF and later to the RN and Army, presents a number of challenges. One of the most important is the cultural change required by individual Service personnel. The MOD firmly believe that today's Service men and women will welcome the opportunity to take control of their own personnel administration through JPA and would expect to have the same, and in some cases better, HR resources and opportunities available to them as any civilian employee.

The provisional JPA roll out dates for the RN and Army were June and Nov 06 respectively and were within the JPA project time frame. In order to allow far greater integration with the Defence Information Infrastructure (DII) project requirements, it was agreed by the JPA Project Board in Feb 06, that the rollout for the RN and Army should be more closely aligned with that for DII. As a result, the current plans are that JPA will be rolled out to the RN in Oct 06 and to the Army in March 07, although these dates are still subject to review and ratification by the JPA Project Board. This decision exemplifies a joined up and sensible approach to Defence wide project delivery and is not a reflection on AFPAA 's ability to deliver JPA.

JPA marks a huge leap forward for Defence, which requires not only an advanced technical solution, but a radical change for every branch and level of the Armed Forces. AFPAA have every confidence in the technical solution and are focused on delivering the quality of service on which our Armed Forces can depend and be proud.

"

I may have missed it earlier on in the thread but as it has todays date on it I thought I would repeat it here.

I particularly like the last paragraph, I certainly feel proud, mainly that I am in the Army, first time in a long time!!

Only missing the bit about having all pigs fully fed and taxiing. If they had carried out full system testing, then they wouldn't be having the load problems, the pay run problems, the data problems, the migration problems, the configuration management problems and the internal PR problems.

If the people that produced this work of fiction were as good at IT as they are at spinning bull!!!! into gold, then JPA would be the true killer application that we are all waiting for. And it would make the tea as well.