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Interdepartmental Analysis Working Group
Root cause analysis on Phoenix issues

From: Public Services and Procurement Canada

Executive Summary

The Interdepartmental Analysis Working Group (IDAT), composed of working-level representatives from organizations across the HR-Pay community, was formed at the request of the Working Group of Ministers on Achieving Steady State for the Pay System to investigate Phoenix system-related issues, using root cause analysis techniques and provide prioritized recommendations.

The group met from July to October 2017. IDAT distilled 257 issues from source documents and departmental high priority issues. To meet time constraints, a subset of issues was selected for analysis based on prioritization and risk assessment. Root cause analysis of these issues resulted in 29 unique root cause analysis reports.

The specific root cause reports should be taken into consideration by the relevant projects now being implemented under the HR-Pay governance. These root causes may inform project activities by providing key information not already understood. In other cases, the root cause analysis may indicate a reprioritization of activities as appropriate.

In addition to the targeted recommendations to address root causes identified in section 3 of this report, three themes emerged, that summarize the findings of IDAT:

A. System

This report has many examples of design choices that may have made sense from a systems perspective but have failed in usability. A client-centric model should be applied to process and system design that accepts certain requirements within the HR-Pay landscape. The Phoenix system requires a rethink of its design and associated processes to simplify the user experience and minimize potential for error. In addition, there are several important incident reports and change requests that should be implemented to fix outstanding functional and technical issues.

B. Business Process

The integrated HR-Pay function is extremely complex, with multiple systems that are now tightly integrated, with new and critical dependencies on accuracy and timeliness. The new landscape (people, process, system, policy) requires integration of business processes, systems design, testing, user documentation, training and end user supports, from HR through to Pay.

C. Change management

Many issues analyzed involved a lack of communication or training. Consistency, timeliness, and accuracy in communications and delivery of tools and training are key. The need to shift the culture from late processing to on-time processing is critical to issuing timely pay to employees. This is a significant change that will not succeed without a workforce development plan supported by a structured, consistent and sustained change management program.

The structure and discipline of formal root cause analysis was found to be very useful in a complete analysis of the issue and identifying areas needing attention. Moving forward, formal root cause analysis should be embedded into HR-Pay landscape activities.

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