Phoenix flap doesn’t inspire faith in Liberal management

Re: Pipeline dream or $4.5B fiasco?, May 30 Auditor dissects Phoenix failure, May 30

It is simply mind-boggling that the federal government did not undertake a pilot project to test Phoenix prior to a full rollout. With 27 collective agreements and 15 bargaining agents, along with the various administrative idiosyncrasies within the dozens of ministries and even more departments, common sense would suggest the need for comprehensive pre-implementation testing.

The failure of Phoenix does little to inspire confidence in the government’s latest decision to spend billions on a pipeline. The auditor general will likely have something to say about that in due course.

With the next federal election less than 17 months away, the Liberal government will have to work hard to convince voters that they know what they are doing.

F. Dale Boire, Ottawa

Pipeline yet another white elephant

Bad decisions, one after the other, and yet absolutely no one is held accountable? The Phoenix pay scandal; the phantom procurement of fighter jets; the obsolete shipbuilding and submarine program; all badly managed. And now we have another white elephant, Kinder Morgan’s Trans Mountain pipeline.

Why in the world does a government get involved in the building, financing and operation of a pipeline for a commodity that eventually will be replaced? Peter A. Ferguson, Gatineau

The rest of the world must be laughing at us

The New York investor who thinks the federal government might make money by buying the Trans Mountain pipeline project probably never heard about the Phoenix project. No doubt the Liberal government will put the same kind of incompetents to run the former as are running the latter.

It would have been a lot cheaper and quicker to declare the pipeline as being “for the general advantage of Canada” and permit Kinder Morgan to proceed with the project. In either case there may still be doubt about the extent to which British Columbia can obstruct the pipeline.

The rest of the world must be having a good laugh and turning away at the sorry state of affairs in Canada.

John Beare, Kanata

It was obvious Phoenix would fail

Any software developer or engineer looking at the initial scope of the project would have found the cost estimates laughable and the scope unbelievable.

Considering the reduced scope after the deletion of prototyping and testing, he or she would have been able to predict failure with almost absolute assurance. The evidence of how not to go about, or whether to go about, a project of this size and complexity has been available for decades.

I would fault the auditor general on only one point. To put another level of review into the project process could so easily lead to the operation of one of Norman Augustine’s most important laws of project management: “If enough layers of management have been piled one upon each other, disaster has not been left to chance.”

There are no organizational fixes for situations like these, only the right kind of experienced personnel with adequate authority, including the authority to say no.

John C. Bauer, Manotick

Look at performance pay in ps overhaul

In an award-winning 2014 paper in the journal Canadian Public Administration, authors Michael Atkinson, Murray Fulton and Boa Kim looked at the use of “performance pay” regimes for executives across multiple levels of government in Canada.

In general, the authors seemed to conclude that governments use them because everyone else uses them, with no particular value added by their use. Standing out among their inferences, for me, was their noting of the risk that “performance” can come to be defined as whatever makes the minister happy.

Auditor general Michael Ferguson’s summary of the series of senior decisions that created the costly Phoenix failure has the appearance of senior managers doing everything they could to “make the minister happy” and align with that government’s goal of achieving (or appearing to achieve) zero deficit in time for the 2015 federal election.

Not to dump all blame on performance pay, but perhaps its elimination or reframing can be one component of the PS culture change the AG recommends. Senior managers need more incentives to be able to challenge unreasonable or untenable demands from their political masters, not incentives to yield to them and march triumphantly towards disaster.

Mark Hammer, Ottawa