Project Management

Department of Public Works and Government Services Canada
Project type : New payroll system
Project name : Phoenix
Date : Jul 2016
Cost : $50M

Synopsis :
A Phoenix is supposed to rise from the flames. Instead of rising, Canadas new federal government payroll system (called Phoenix) seems to be stuck firmly in the flames. According to reports from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), since the deployment of a new payroll system started in Feb 2016, as good percentage of public servants have been incorrectly paid. Some have received too little, some too much and some have received no pay at all. Some employees have reported receiving no pay for a full five months resulting in people having to borrow, dip into retirement savings or simply not pay their bills. The CBC has been championing the cases of the affected workers and has collated sample stories in the following links

The breadth of the problem and the fact it has endured for 5 months has forced the issue up the political agenda to the point where the Prime Minister has been forced to comment on the problems (you know your project is in trouble when the Prime Minister has to address the issue)

As soon as the system was launched it was clear there were problems. As many as 7,000 calls per day were received by the system help desk. Being sized for a maximum of 2,200 calls per day the help desk was quickly overcome. By July of 2016, the number of outstanding problems reported by government employees had reached a staggering 82,000 cases. An analysis of the problems by government staff and IBM (the IT systems provider) found that the costs to address the ousting issues could be as a high as $50M).

Contributing factors as reported in the press:
Failure to provide users with adequate training. Failure to cleanse data prior to migration to the new system. Software quality issues. Failure to have sufficient resources on hand to address launch glitches and problems.

Links:

The Prime Minister has asked you to come in with your team and try to figure out what went wrong. Answer the below questions in depth and number questions as answered.

1. Explain how you would start building your case with executives including the Prime Minister to ensure that you received all of the resources you might need?

2. You are asked to hold a briefing to explain what your action plan is going to be. What senior leadership, managers, or workers would you ask to attend? And why? I am really interested to see who you would pull together to start building the network you need .

3. Suppose you find out capacity planning was the issue as the organization wasn’t nearly mature as they think they are. Using the content you read in chapter 21 of the Textbook “Larson, E. W., & Gray, C. F. (2018). Project management: the managerial process (7th ed.). New York Mcgraw-Hill Education.” what do you do to get executives to understand this? Just set your approach up. You don’t have to dive into the details at this point. I want to know what your major points of intererest and focus are.