Public Services and Procurement Canada is taking another step to ‘stabilize’ the federal government’s ongoing pay crisis by re-jigging the way the troubled Phoenix payroll system and human resources are managed across departments.

PSPC Deputy Minister Marie Lemay and Treasury Board Secretary Yaprak Baltacıoğlu informed all deputy ministers Wednesday of the new governance structure aimed at “stabilization” of the government’s pay system.

A new leadership team, headed by PSPC associate deputy minister Les Linklater, will now be calling the shots for both pay and human resources in a bid to better integrate the two functions – which have largely operated separately since Phoenix went live more than a year ago.

Linklater will report to both PSCP Acting Minister Jim Carr and Treasury Board President Scott Brison. He and his team will also take direction from a new Phoenix committee of deputy ministers.

“This approach reflects our firm commitment to ensure a comprehensive and integrated approach to HR and pay, and to involve all departments and agencies in working toward stabilization,” said a letter sent to deputy ministers.

Linklater will replace Lemay as the lead for fixing Phoenix. Lemay, who took over the PSPC deputy minister job days before Phoenix went live, has become the face of the government’s efforts to fix Phoenix with her public updates on the beleaguered system.

Linklater will bring together what the government considers the two main pieces to fix Phoenix – pay and human resources – with senior executives responsible for each reporting to him. He will also oversee a new pay project management office for Phoenix being set up at PCPC.

One senior official said the move is aimed at “pulling all the resources under one person” rather than the piecemeal approach that has been taken so far. Another said the new structure gives Linklater “access to all the levers” needed to coordinate the fixing of Phoenix.

It also sharpens the accountability by making a central team responsible. The move will also help the department come up with a “sustainable” approach to pay management rather than operating in crisis like has for the past year.

Linklater’s team includes Cécile Cléroux, assistant deputy minister at Treasury Board’s chief human resources office, who will oversee human resource policies and processes. PSPC executives Alex Lakroni, and Marc Lemieux, an associate ADM, take over pay administration. They start their new duties July 4.

The executive to head the new pay project office has yet to be named.

Two other committees will support the deputy minister committee – one comprised of assistant deputy ministers and another of director-generals from all departments, not just the 45 served by the Miramichi pay centre.

The new governance structure is PSPC’s latest step to turn around the Phoenix pay disaster – one many say should have been in place when Phoenix was in the planning stages.

The new pay system was planned and largely built under the previous Conservative government. The Liberals made the decision, on the advice of bureaucrats, to go live with Phoenix in a two-stage rollout last year.

The Trudeau government has invested heavily in fixing Phoenix – setting up satellite pay centres, call centres, hiring more compensation advisors, installing fixes and system enhancements.

The cost has exceeded the savings the project was expected to generate. The government recently pumped in another $142 million, with a large share going to hiring more compensation advisers and running boot camps to give them crash courses in Phoenix. A CBC report said boot camp costs hit more than $1.2 million between June 2016 and May 1 2017.

Many have called Phoenix a ‘governance’ failure. There were too many players and accountability was too diffuse. No one was really accountable and departments didn’t have enough skin in the game to make sure everyone did their bit to ensure a massive enterprise–wide project worked.

“This is a governance and management problem,” said Maryantonett Flumian, president of the Institute on Governance.

“Who is responsible for what should be clear because managing a project for the collective that will affect all departments demands a shared accountability that is very different from managing a program or a department, which is how the public servants have been taught to manage.”

But Debi Daviau, president of the Professional Institute of the Public Service of Canada, said it remains to be seen if another “shuffling of the deck will get us anywhere.”

“A lot of this might have been more useful before we went through the pay transformation, but at this point it feels like more bureaucracy. I am having trouble seeing how it will fully enable the solutions our members are seeking.”

Former Auditor-General Denis Desautels led a 2005 study for the Ontario government – which is still widely consulted today – on why IT projects fail.

He concluded that major transformation projects are too often managed as IT projects rather than the “complex organizational change management challenge that they actually are.”

New technology, such as Phoenix, bring radical changes to old business processes that have a ripple-effect on what people do and the way they work that is often underestimated and not managed properly.

The department has acknowledged that Phoenix was a massive ‘change management’ failure. Public servants weren’t trained enough and departments were simply unprepared for how much the system would change what people do and the way they work.

The new team will be integrating the technology and process fixes with policies and practices of human resources staff who use the system and approve transactions.

In fixing Phoenix, the government discovered that it has many practices that doesn’t mesh with the system.

Acting pay, for example, has been a huge headache requiring manual calculation which led to thousands of files backing up in the queue. Phoenix works when employees claim acting pay in ‘real time’ as they work it rather than claiming it retroactively after they filled or acted in a position. For years, the practice has been for employees to claim it retroactively.

Union leaders recently met with the ministerial working group Prime Minister Justin Trudeau appointed in April to help find a government-wide fix.

Robyn Benson, president of the Public Service Alliance of Canada, said she told ministers the things she thought needed to be done. She said still needs to hire more compensation advisers, the pay centre in Miramichi. N.B. needs more resources, the call centres should be manned by public servants familiar with federal pay and IBM should be engaged to fix outstanding technology glitches.

“There is still no rhyme or reason to when things go wrong,” said Benson. “Everything could be fine one pay day and the next one is broken.”