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Debi Daviau, president of the Professional Institute of the Public Service of Canada, earlier this week suggested it will take at least three more years to get Phoenix to steady state. The current approach, she added, may never succeed.

Daviau’s prescription: “We need a pay system that works, and we have the people to build it,” she said.

Daviau made clear in a followup interview that she was not proposing that her union take over the job of fixing Phoenix. While PIPSC has 57,000 members, many of them experts in information technology, fewer than 30 are directly involved in the Phoenix project.

Daviau says she merely wants the managers at Public Services to consult with the experts on the ground — in her union’s case, the software jocks. These are the folks who understand the PeopleSoft technology that underpins most of the government’s pay transactions. And they are telling Daviau that building a new pay system on the foundation of PeopleSoft’s latest technology platform (version 9.2) can be done in as little as a year.

There’s much more to it, of course, and Daviau understands that. The underlying technology merely captures the pay data. Processing it requires hundreds of employees trained on a system with more than 80,000 rules governing the application of pay in all its variants, from maternity leave to overtime, across 27 collective agreements. Members of the Public Service Alliance of Canada, the largest federal government union, do much of the processing at a centralized pay centre in Miramichi, N.B.