ANDREA GUNN Ottawa Bureau
Published August 22, 2018 – 8:20pm
The federal government is slated to announce the first phase of the procurement process to replace the ill-fated Phoenix system, and this time they’re taking a try-before-you-buy approach.
In an exclusive interview with The Chronicle Herald, Scott Brison, president of the Treasury Board, minister of digital government and MP for the Nova Scotia riding of Kings-Hants, said the new hands-on approach will be a very different process than the one used when procuring Phoenix from IBM.
“Over the last year we did a lot of foundational work in terms of fundamentally changing how we do digital as a government, in terms of procurement what that means is more show and less tell,” Brison said.
In the past, he said, vendors have been judged based more on their ability to write a 250-page proposal than to come up with a solution that actually works.
This time around the federal government — led by the Treasury Board in conjunction with Public Services and Procurement Canada (PSPC) and other departments — will be looking for working prototypes of the software that pay specialists will be able to actually try as part of the procurement process.
“Public servants will be at the very centre of it in terms of testing and re-testing, end to end, the prototypes; the idea is to be able to compare based on actual working prototypes what each vendor can do,” Brison said.
The result, he said, will hopefully be a functional, agile and user-friendly system to replace Phoenix.
“The ideal scenario is that the users of a digital system help shape the product and the service,” Brison said.
“We should be able to have a pay system that not only pays people on time and accurately but is designed intuitively around the needs of public servants.”
The 2018 budget earmarked $16 million over two years, beginning in 2018–19, for the federal government to work with experts, public sector unions and technology providers on a new pay system, and for Brison the upcoming announcement for the procurement process is the culmination of some of that work.
Following the announcement of the procurement process this week, Brison said government will see demonstrations of capabilities from vendors over the next several months to confirm contractors can do what they say they can.
Then government, based on input from experts and from the public service, will work on co-designing solutions with vendors in a sandbox environment, testing them, and comparing them.
At the same time, Brison said, there is a lot of work still to be done with Phoenix, and said PSPC is working hard on that file.
“We have to keep our foot on the gas to stabilize the existing system and make sure we’re doing what it takes to get there — that work is important and its ongoing and it’s a priority,” he said.
By getting an early start on procuring a new system, Brison said Ottawa hopes to learn from one of the key mistakes made with Phoenix — gutting the legacy system before the new system had been proven.
“(The previous Conservative government) created a sense of urgency by getting rid of the legacy system so there was no choice but to go forward,” he said.
“It was kind of like a bad marriage based on the wrong assumptions — nobody is happy and they stay together for the bad contract or the sunk costs.”
The Phoenix system was procured from IBM by the Conservative government to replace a decades-old system, and employees began reporting issues with their pay soon after the system launched in early 2016.
More than half of the federal government’s 290,000 public servants have experienced pay problems ranging from no pay to massive overpayments. In Nova Scotia, nine out of 10 federal public servants have experienced issues with their paycheque.
What was touted by the Conservatives, and later the Liberals, as a way to streamline pay services and save taxpayer money has instead cost nearly $1 billion in unplanned expenses — nearly three times the original cost to implement the program. In July, the Senate committee on national finance warned that the price tag to fix Phoenix could reach $2.2 billion by 2023.
That’s why in finding a replacement, Brison said, it’s important to allocate enough time and resources to ensure they end up with a system that works.
“We are not going to cut corners and rush things,” Brison said
“We are going to work in partnership with public service, the unions representing the public service, the vendor community to get this right.”
Colleen Coffey, Atlantic Canada executive vice-president with the Public Service Alliance of Canada (PSAC), said she has had several conversations with Brison about the plans for the new procurement process, and she’s quite pleased with what she’s been told.
Coffey said with all the headaches caused by Phoenix, the mention of a new pay system tends to send public servants into “panic mode.” She said meaningfully engaging them in the procurement process and giving them the opportunity to say what works and what doesn’t will be crucial, not only for gaining their support, but also ensuring the new system is functional.
“That’s what is most important, they cannot press go like they did with Phoenix until all this testing is done,” she said,
“To me (this is) more than promising, it actually shows that they’ve learned that they can’t just push things out, it shows that they’ve listened to PSAC and, it I think, it shows respect for the employees, that they value their input and their ideas.”
