Question

The topic to be researched is Phoenix Pay as it relates to the Canada government. Spend time investigating the available information and prepare to discuss in class.

What is Phoenix?

What is the history?

Why was it chosen?

When did it happen?

Results?

How do you think it turned out?

What is your opinion?

Would you have done anything differently?

Any suggestions for going forward?

Other thoughts?

Answer 1

Solution -

Phoenix pay system was a payroll processing system for the government employees of Canada. This system was launched as an initiative by the then prime minister Stephen Harper and was introduced to transform the legacy pay system of that time.

The phoenix pay system was introduced as an initiative under the transformation of pay administration brought about by Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s cabinet. This initiative was to replace a 40-year-old payroll system and was considered to be fully automated. This system was to bring the payroll administration of employees in one place and was to cover 101 departments with nearly 300,000 employees. The system was supposed to save a cost of around $70 million a year. The Inception of this system started in the year 2011 when IBM won the contract to set up such a system. The new payment center was set up at Miramichi Public Service Centre. From May 2012 the pay center started to eliminate the pay advisors. The implementation of the system was in a haphazard manner which led to certain discrepancies.

The phoenix pay system was primarily introduced to streamline the administrative pay services and also reduce certain administration costs. The other major reason for this new pay system was to bring about a change in the way of work and completely transform the pay system.

The implementation of this new pay system happened in the year 2015. This system was implemented without any pilot testing and was brought into force in a certain kind of haste by the government.

The result of such an implementation was that there were certain discrepancies faced by the employees and there were cases when certain employees did not receive their pay on time and this resulted in many complaint issues. The major chunk of the problem was with the employees whose position and ranks changed and those employees who were new hires or were temporary in nature. Employees that were coming back from long leaves were also affected by the system and many benefits were not paid on time. All this was due to the discrepancy in the data set and also no integration testing and stress testing is done on the system before the launch.

It is clear that the system did not provide the intended results because of the wrong implementation and no pilot testing. In my view, the system was implemented in a hasty manner which led to certain problems and exceptions that were never planned for. This led to dissatisfaction within the government employees and it also turned the efficient system into a hazard.

In my view the system requires a complete overhaul. Had I been in a place of some power I would have looked to test the system thoroughly before implementation. The major dependency of the efficiency of the system is on the employee database. My first concentration would have been to ensure that there is an easy mechanism in place to update the database and also the data is thoroughly checked and cleaned. This would have led to a situation where the tool efficiency would have been highlighted and the end-users would have started to trust the new pay system.

In the current scenario it is necessary that a database sanity check is conducted to ensure that all the data is currently updated. It is also necessary to replace the system but one needs to understand that the poor efficiency of the system was not because the system in itself was incapable but because it was implemented in a wrong fashion hence it is imperative that the Canadian government takes cognizance of the fact that the principle of ‘garbage in garbage out’ applies to any automation. This would help them to ensure that the correct input is fed into the system. This will automatically take care of many current problems. The other aspect is that before implementation and rollout the system needs to be properly tested.