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DFS tells subcommittee Florida PALM go-live moved to January 2027; full UAT to begin in February, six-month delay adds $10.7M to contract total
Summary
DFS reported that after pre-UAT testing the executive steering committee voted to move the Florida PALM go-live from July 2026 to January 2027; full UAT is planned for February and the contract amendment increased total contract costs by $10.7M (negotiated down from $18M). DFS said it completed multiple mock conversions and will begin dry runs and pre-cutover testing later in the year.
The committee’s second agenda item focused on Florida PALM (POM). Steven Fielder, chief business officer at the Department of Financial Services (DFS), briefed the subcommittee on project progress, testing milestones and budgetary effects of the schedule change.
Fielder said integration and pre-UAT testing occurred in 2025 with enterprise partners and selected agencies. Based on pre-UAT results the project team and the Executive Steering Committee concluded the previously announced July 2026 go-live date was not feasible and voted to move deployment to January 2027. Fielder said the steering committee had scheduled a vote to begin full UAT the following week; assuming approval, full UAT would begin in February and run through July with more than 30 in-person UAT sessions planned.
Why it matters: Florida PALM will replace the legacy FLAIR accounting system and is intended to centralize financial and human-resource systems across executive agencies and the legislature. The transition affects the state’s ability to run payroll, payments and other core accounting functions during cutover and requires extensive agency coordination.
Key takeaways from the DFS update and Q&A:
- Schedule and testing: DFS reported they already ran multiple mock data conversions (five cadences) and that dry runs and pre-cutover activities are scheduled prior to go-live. A full data conversion will be used for final migration (a complete dump rather than incremental updates).
- Budget and contract impacts: Moving the go-live produced a ripple effect across fiscal years. DFS said it expects to revert approximately $13.2M in the current fiscal year because implementation deliverables shifted. The amendment negotiated with the vendor (amendment 13) added $10.7M to the total contract cost (reduced from an $18M contingency estimate through negotiation). DFS also said the project included penalties for missed deliverables in the past and that amendment 13 increased the money at risk for the vendor going forward.
- Reasons for the delay: Project leadership cited scope creep during design, discovered requirements tied to legacy FLAIR behaviors, and the results of pre-UAT (bug fixes and readiness gaps) as primary reasons for the six-month shift. Officials said some of the delay requirements were state-driven (new approach decisions) and some were due to vendor readiness.
- Hosting model and operations: The system uses PeopleSoft (Oracle) software hosted in the cloud as infrastructure-as-a-service; DFS clarified it is not an Oracle cloud SaaS product and that the state will maintain operational responsibility with vendor support for implementation and hosting early on.
- Penalties and vendor accountability: DFS said the vendor missed multiple deliverables and that earlier contract amendments included penalties (DFS cited aggregate penalty amounts in the low hundreds of thousands of dollars for specific missed deliverables). Amendment 13 added more vendor financial exposure going forward.
Next steps: The executive steering committee will vote to start full UAT, which DFS expects to begin in February. Agencies will complete readiness certifications, and the project team will continue integration testing, dry runs, and pre-cutover activities ahead of the January 2027 go-live.
