PUBLIC SERVICE MUST OWN UP

The mind reels, every time there’s a new revelation about the Phoenix pay system. What’s interesting about Tuesday’s auditor general report is that Michael Ferguson re-treads some familiar ground, while also laying out some stern words for the federal public service itself.

“The building and implementation of Phoenix was an incomprehensible failure of project management and oversight,” says the report. It’s Michael Ferguson’s second look at Phoenix in half a year. And Ferguson says, in his message to Parliament accompanying the report, the public service “fears mistakes and risk.”

“Its ability to convey hard truths has eroded, as has the willingness of senior levels — including ministers — to hear hard truths,” Ferguson continues. “This culture causes the incomprehensible failures it is trying to avoid.”

In other words, a root cause of the Phoenix failure is the culture within the public service. And, “the bottom line is that a change in the culture of the federal government will be the best hope to prevent incomprehensible failures in the future,” he says.

It’s a tall order. Culture change is tremendously difficult. Incivility has been flagged as a problem within the public service, as has a fear of blowing the whistle on issues. Culture isn’t an exceptionally new issue.

Now, Ferguson does make some technical recommendations that could prevent such a failure in the future. The price tag to fix Phoenix has climbed above the $1-billion mark. And it’s still not fixed.

The details of what went wrong haven’t ceased to shock. For example, in the interest of an ontime project rollout — maybe better phrased as cutting corners — management opted against testing Phoenix, cancelling a pilot in 2015, and it seems likely it would’ve revealed the problems that everyone found out about the hard way.

“Phoenix executives were more focused on meeting the project budget and timeline than on what the system needed to do,” the report says.

Ferguson’s key recommendation is that there be an independent review of such projects well before they go live. That makes sense and the government has said so. Good. That’s a straightforward solution but it’s one that catches mistakes, not prevents them.

Culture change would. While hard, as the adage goes, change comes from within. All levels of the public service must recognize that failure “cannot and should not be eliminated. Failure is a way to learn and improve,” as Ferguson says. Change requires leadership.

The question now, of course, is who’s going to step up and show it?