Queensland’s government has scrambled a team of 120 staff to fix its Unify IT system after a “sobering” review of the $183 million inhouse-developed system outlined a raft of serious technical, process and governance failures.

The Deloitte review identified a series of decisions that led to the “systematic failure” of the redeveloped Unify child safety case management system, which was marked for replacement in 2019 and funded with $51 million from the Palaszczuk government.

That effort to replace the department’s ageing Integrated Client Management System (ICMS) with Unify, was originally slated to be implemented in three stages over four years to “better support staff and enable more streamlined processes.”

The contract was initially awarded to a third party for development that began in 2020, but by 2022 the Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Azure-based project faced issues and was brought inhouse to be built within the department.

Within a year even this approach was encountering problems, causing timeline and cost blowouts that saw Unify rescoped in 2023, then again in 2024 as the decision was made to remove key operational and corporate reporting functionality.

“These decisions ultimately led to the systematic failure of Unify,” the new report found – and by go-live in April last year, authorities were struggling to get meaningful information from the system, which had a staff approval rating of just 1.79 out of 10.

The number of overdue child intakes – a departmental KPI – had grown to 40 per cent by September, meaning that children were being left exposed in potentially dangerous living situations because frontline staff couldn’t use Unify to manage their caseloads.

Reversing years of project management failures

Particularly in the context of systemic failures by child protection authorities in Queensland and nationwide – and a swathe of new child safety laws in the state – the breadth of the failures caused by Unify have sounded alarm bells.

Minister for Child Safety Amanda Camm has denied being aware of any critical issues with Unify before it went live.

“I did not know about the de-scoping of the functionality of the system, nor the history of the system until we read the findings of this report,” the ABC quotes her as saying.

Incoming government briefs, she added, said the system “had been developed, designed, and was ready to be delivered” – although reports of major problems with the system were widespread within weeks of launch.

Although Camm made the call to go live on Unify, by September last year the Crisafulli government had changed the narrative and was lambasting the “bungled IT program putting children at risk” as a critical failure of the Palaczcuk government.

It appointed nine child safety staff in a backlog blitz that had reduced the overdue child intake figure to 0.6 per cent by February.

The government has now brought in 120 staff to fix Unify under a rescue project that will rapidly build the previously descoped reporting and other elements of the project.

It is expected to see the system publishing operational data within one month, restoring corporate data within three months, and stabilising the system within 6 months.

Fool me once…

The new report lays bare the process by which Unify went off the rails, with Camm saying it “unveils the decisions leading up to this moment that should never have been made.”

Yet Unify’s failures aren’t the Sunshine State’s first brush with IT project management failures: a decade earlier, the Labor Beattie and Bligh governments orchestrated what has been referred to as Australia’s worst ever IT project management failure.

That project, which involved the building of a new payroll system to replace Queensland Health’s end-of-life LATTICE system, saw IBM appointed as prime contractor in 2007 on the expectation that the system would be live by mid 2008.

A series of project failures led to the creation of a stopgap payroll processing system that required 1,000 people to manually process fortnightly pay for 80,000 Queensland Health employees – even as the cost of the disaster spiralled to $1.2 billion over 8 years.

The system, which the Queensland Qld Health Payroll System Commission of Inquiry report said “must take a place in the front rank of failures in public administration in this country [and] may be the worst,” saw IBM sued and banned from state IT from 2013 to 2025.