Phoenix frankly speaking — Part IV: Kept awake at night

The stories I’ve been reading about the hardships caused by Phoenix were keeping me awake last night. I was thinking of the feedback received on the Medium posts and I lay there thinking ‘alright Jack, it’s your file, what’s your call?’

My call. Well, it’s a disaster, right? So the first thing you do in a disaster is stand up your emergency operations centre (EOC) — which has strategic, operational and tactical expertise to coordinate responses.

The need is for timely, efficient, co-ordinated responses that meet real needs — and that’s where an EOC comes in. It can:

· Collect and analyse real-time information on adverse impacts

· Ensure that clear triaging process is in place, prioritising by type, severity, need against resources and case mix (volume and acuity)

· Conduct hazards scanning and foresight exercises for planning and response

· Pull together cross-functional ‘trouble shooting’ teams for deployment to hot spots

· Ensure quick fixes are shared and implemented across the environment

· Ensure duplication of efforts are avoided — conserving needed resources

· Ensure that the rules of engagement (including roles and responsibilities) are communicated clearly to all

· Identify and ensure resources are mobilised and distributed against a plan that is shared with all

An EOC helps establish the flow of critical information in an environment that’s been disrupted so that appropriate action based on that information can be taken. Good ones establish minimally a C3 model: command, control, and communications. They use network models of information to act quickly on the ground. EOCs can also leverage the desire, the energy of the distributed population that wants to help, who want to ‘do something now’, effectively and efficiently.

This is contra the Phoenix response model, which so far as can be seen, has deferred to the outdated command and control, top-down hierarchical model — with all its known flaws of siloes of communication and broken chains of accountability.

What we see now suggests we have not yet understood how to respond to the disaster because we haven’t framed the problem space correctly yet, so we’re still using the wrong tools to address the challenge. When you read what measures are being taken to address pay issues, you still don’t know who is on first, what C3 model is in place, if any. You would read about the following activities underway:

· Call centres in Toronto are doing triaging before an employee gets to speak to a compensation advisor

· PSPC satellite offices are scattered across the country

· Miramichi has pooled expert compensation advisors to its location

· CFO and HR communities are tasked with identifying root causes and possible solutions and to ‘discuss issues’

· Subject matter experts have been tapped — we’re left to infer they are from the CFO and HR communities

· CSPS is developing training for employees and managers

· A TBS-PSAC chaired union/management joint committee meets ‘regularly’ to provide a issues forum and to share feedback from employees — what happens to the outputs (are there outputs?)

o A technical sub-committee reviews/assesses/identifies existing and future issues — we can assume with no mandate to act

· IBM and pay specialists are studying pay system implementation issues and stress-testing detailed processing models (better late than never?)

Then you reach the bottom of the page and realise in horror this material was originally created and posted sometime late in the fall of 2016. A year ago.

You note glumly that there are a whack of additional performance indicators listed that we should now have at least one year’s performance data on, that ideally would be reported on publicly (e.g. via the Phoenix dashboard).

Spend a little time on social media for the Phoenixed and you know these interventions are not working for thousands of affected people. Scout around public service sites heavily implicated in fixing this file and you will find no record of minutes, records of decision, activities and outputs. Make yourself ready to learn the tools and resources — you will find many are behind firewalls (access issue); and hard to use. A review of inputs (who is consulted) underscores how little the front-line employee is being engaged in mapping the current and desired state to resolve their problems (again, consult social media, and h/t to Lemay’s office which seems to be actioning requests that come directly to their attention — although that is not a sustainable solution).

The lead department is nominally the PSPC, but the Clerk just the other week reached out to the various Deputy Heads (DHs) to find out what they were doing individually in their departments. And next week, the Office of the Auditor General will release its findings on the pay system — another silo of information (in this case a right and just separation — my concern here is about the siloes that impede taking appropriate course corrections).

The employer has evidently decided that the onus for solving problems on the ground defaults to the employee — where instead, the employee should be able to simply flag an issue and then the system should take on the response actions (the file building, calculations, tax implications, redress measures, etc.). The employer should internalise resolving the matter on behalf of the employee.

As I said in Part I, we already possess the skills and competencies to implement such a response — and not just the IT coding and project management skills. The broad strokes methodology for emergency response (we’re past preparedness) are largely the same regardless of earthquake, flooding, fire — or Phoenix. And that Early Warning System I referred to in Part II? We have that expertise as well [hope those guys are getting paid — they’ve been migrated to Phoenix].

At this point, I invite you to take part in a thought experiment:

You are part of the team that plays a service delivery role for Canadians. You supervise a small team, and lead a crucial part of an emergency response function. You haven’t been paid properly for over a year:

· one month you were underpaid by $4000, so you put in a pay action request and received an emergency advance of $3000

· three months later, $12 000 showed up in your bank account

· the following month, your pay dropped again and you received a notice of overpayment

· when you review your pay stubs, you can’t determine what the overpayment was for

During this time:

· your union and the employer have settled the Collective Agreement and you were one of the lucky ones to receive your retroactive pay quickly — or so you thought

· you also qualified for an annual step increment in your pay, with a corresponding increase in salary.

Maddeningly, you can’t independently verify or reconcile any of the numbers

You’ve tried multiple times to call the PSPC pay centre — on the one time you reached someone, they told you they can only triage your call, they can’t actually do anything on your file — that call had you on hold for 1 hour. Your repeated attempts to get through to sometime add up to several hours. Months follow of overpayment/underpayment. This goes on for more than a year.

You did not create this chaos. You have little control over this process. You have not been made whole by your employer for the work you have done. Yet you and your loved ones will bear the cost:

· you are treated like a deadbeat for not repaying money you can’t determine you have received

· you miss payments on your car because the mortgage comes first

· You have maxed out your credit cards

· your two-month rainy-day buffer in your bank account has vanished

· family members back away from you when they see you coming with that pleading look in your eye

You have tried to read your pay stubs. You have started a spreadsheet at home to keep track of the chaos. You’ve read all the infographics and FAQs on the PSPC website and are still hopelessly confused.

The one thing that became very clear as you read all the material and tried all the steps in the ‘process’ is that the responsibility to take all the actions necessary to rectify this situation and any adverse consequences fall onto you.

You lose sleep worrying about how to pay your bills. And now, there is a forest fire in BC and you will deploy and do your job — people are counting on you to save their homes. Off you go, anxious and unrested, into the fire zone, trying to keep the job at hand front and centre in your mind.

The thoughts that keep you awake at night are of your dreams, your home and your plans going up in smoke.

And Christmas is coming.

So what, after this last year, is front and center in your mind?

That’s right. Where is your EOC? Where is your rapid response team?