Are city staff both 'excited and dealing with internal terror' asks the Mayor and is there an answer to the Customer Relations Management problem?

By Pepper Parr

February 18th, 2020

BURLINGTON, ON

The Audit Committee heard the report from the Auditor on the problems with the Customer Relations Management (CRM) system that is long, involved and at times confusing.  It is broken into two parts.  This is part 1.

It started out quietly enough – there were those awkward moments when Council members know they are going to ask some tough questions and staff sit at their spots and wait for the questions about a situation they know is a real mess. Councillor Sharman who is the Chair of the Audit Committee with Councillor Lisa Kearns serving as the vice chair, were facing off with Sheila Jones, the auditor who produced the report. Jones is now the Executive Director, Strategy, Risk and Accountability.

Sharman opened the meeting by saying to Sheila Jones: “I expect you want to speak.” He certainly wanted to ask questions.

Kearns asked Sheila Jones: What promoted the audit?
Jones replied: “The Business lead approached her asking her if she would consider doing an audit.
“I jumped on it” said Jones

During the discussion about the status of the CRM and the audit that was done by Jones the names of other staff were rarely, if ever, mentioned. It appears to be bad practice in Burlington, to actually name the people who did work in the past.
Kearns then wanted to know: What did we learn?

Jones: We looked at the Project Management activities to learn what had been done.

Angelo Bentivegna asked Jones to: Take me through what CRM does.  Bentivegna’s understanding of the technical IT side of the municipal sector has always been limited.

Jones explained that CRM was the best way to “get to know our customers”

The program administration started out in the Clerk’s office then he went to a Project management office. There were no timelines in the Auditor’s report making it difficult to pinpoint just when the CRM system configuration went off the tracks.

Angelo asks: The pause now then is to regroup?

How long before we know what happens next?

Mayor Marianne Meed Ward chimed in saying she was a huge believer in customer service and was fine with technology being used but “the challenge with this one” is the way it has been rolled out and that it doesn’t give us what we need, which begs the questions “is this the solution for us”?

Mention was made of the institutional database that would get created and the issues with employee transition.

Do we need to go back to square one, she asked?

At this point city manager Tim Commisso spoke; not something he does all that often and rarely does he speak at length or with all that much passion.

We saw a different city manager last Wednesday, who said at the time that the software the city had chosen was “functionally rich; a platform you can build on”.

He added that he had considerable experience with CRM systems. “They do work” he said and the one we have chosen is amongst the top three on the market.

There will be a portal that people can look in on and self-serve themselves for information he said.

The people behind the CRM service decided that a staggered roll out was best; that meant that for those who were part of the early phase would be working with somewhat limited service.

The decision to make members of city council part of that roll out is one that the Clerk has admitted was a mistake. City Councillors find that they are stuck in the middle of a problem they didn’t create; didn’t have much input on either. They were new to the job of being a city Councillor and then were saddled with a system that didn’t meet their critical needs; that the Clerk’s office chose to use Councillors first is yet another example of the dysfunction of that office.

One of the reasons for the staggered roll out appears to be that the CRM project was not properly resourced and didn’t appear to have strong leadership at the top.

One Gazette reader wrote the city saying:

“It is evident that the senior leadership team and the then city manager James Ridge were not invested in the process from day one. FTE were never fully deployed from the respective departments from what is (sic) sounds like. Like any large scale enterprise change, if there is resistance at the top there is inevitably failure. I am sure the project team had a good rollout strategy that did not include the mayor and council being on the forefront of the bleeding edge of a pilot. That blame will need to sit on the lap of the politicians. They should have been late adopters after process gaps were identified and corrected. But here we are getting Lisa Kearns to tell us all that the staff didn’t get it right. It is a corporate system built for staff to handle the operations of the city through a public lens. There is certainly lots of bashing going around. In a nutshell, overworked staff, a pathetic budget, a non-strategic senior leadership team and a champion now retired and writing books.”

City manager Tim Commisso admits that “we are not there yet and suggested it might be as much as a year to a year and a half before the city is getting what it believes the CRM service can deliver”.

To be fair to Commisso – the project was in really bad shape before he was brought in as an interim city manager.

He was hired in January of 2019; Sheila Jones produced her report in November of 2019. Commisso was stuck in the middle of a mess that he had nothing to do with – to his credit he is soldiering through it.

Mayor Meed Ward is completely onside with the technology, which she admits she doesn’t understand all that well – she has chosen to trust the man council hired to make things work at the administrative level.

Her question to Commisso, Jones and the rest of the people involved was: “What do you need from council? And how do you help us help you?”

Fabi Karimullah told the Audit committee that the software is not difficult to operate. Previously Commisso had explained that staff do not have to write any code to get the benefit of what a CRM system will do. It does however have to be configured properly. Poor execution on the configuration, no independent support on doing that configuration along with very poor buy in from a number of departments combined, led to the mess staff are now working their way through.

No one appears to have understood just how big an impact the creating of a CRM system was going to have on staff – it meant that a lot of things were going to be done differently but no one did anything to bring staff onside.

Change management just wasn’t something that anyone gave any thought to. Sheila Jones told council that to the best of her knowledge there is just one person on staff who had any training in Change Management.

Jones admitted the subject wasn’t anything she had any experience with other than being aware of the discipline. Jones was the auditor and was doing that job very well. She had succeeded in bringing a higher level of discipline into processes.

When the Business Review process was put in place back in 2014  when Jeff  Fielding  was the city manager, Sheila Jones spearheaded the introduction of the service and did a fine job of explaining what it would do.

The job she did then didn’t get done with the CRM program -as that became evident during the meeting Councillor Sharman began probing – he had some idea as to what had taken place and how serious the mess was.

Councillors Sharman and Kearns were almost like a wrestling tag team in the way they stick handled the questions they put to staff.

The Information Technology (IT) people realize now that they should have been embedded in the CRM process. They did take part in determining which vendor would provide the service. Christine Swenor said that IT was not responsible for the implementing of any Change Management; she did agree that IT should have been more embedded in the process that was taking place.

One wonders just what the Burlington Leadership Team (BLT) was doing while the problems were getting more and more serious. The BLT is the organization that has representation from every department, usually from the Director level.  Apparently there were no red flags raised at that level.

So, a pause is in place. For how long? And what is it going to cost? No one asked that question.

One resident asked the Clerk:

“Did it ever occur to anyone in 2015 when you engaged “citizens, council members, staff and citizen advisory groups” that the public would not want the City to have “their personal information” on record, no matter how “committed the City is to protecting our personal information confidential and secure”. We are well aware that nothing is “secure” on the internet.

“As for the staff who are currently using the new CRM System they seem not to know just what is expected of them. When I go to the Service Burlington desk with my case number after two weeks of hearing nothing and I am told that I have to contact the Mayor’s office, with no attempt at even checking to see if the email ever was received in the Mayor’s Office there is a problem.

“When Councillors indicate that they haven’t been receiving any emails that is a problem. Please explain how this new system is going to streamline engaging with residents “to better serve and respond to customer information and service requests?

“I hope that the Mayor and Council take a very good look at this system and how it impacts communicating with residents, especially since most residents have no idea that their personal information is being kept on file.”

City manager Tim Commisso said “we can see the big picture but we are not there yet.

The resources needed are in place and the Executive lead, Angela Morgan, reports to the city manager. Commisso said: “We are in a good place now and I am comfortable.

Fabi Karimullah, the current project manager, explained that the CRM is more than just the software – we had to determine what the software was going to do and how it would be configured, and also to determine if we were ready for the change.

There were customer relations people in departments whose role was going to change.

Commisso said on more than one occasion that what was needed was stability, focus and execution – none of which appeared to be in place. “We have to explain to people what the service is going to do and then to deliver on that explanation.

Kearns wanted to know what was different now; Commisso responded that the product and the vendor are what is needed to do the job and that there is now a dedicated project management person in place.

Karimullah added that there are still a number of steps to be taken before everyone is truly talking to each other.

The scope of the project has to be determined, she said. Asked if the CRM service will be integrated with other systems Fabi said “if you throw enough money at a program it can be integrated with anything but that may not really serve the customer’.

Christine Swenor added that process efficiency was another serious consideration; there had to be a single source for the data.

Kearns asked if a Staff Direction was needed.

Commisso didn’t think so but suggested that CRM could issue reports that were similar to what the ERP project is delivering.

The Mayor added that city hall is “both excited and dealing with internal terror”. How are we going to manage that?

Angelo Bentivegna asked about the risk involved: Will we lose everything we have done so far?

Commisso admitted that there is a risk – and that is in developing a culture at city hall that accepts and embraces change.

Sheila Jones added that she was working with Prosci (the Change Management consultants) and that different departments were at different stages of getting on board the need for change. Her immediate target was a state of “structured discipline that is fully understood and embedded in everything that is done.”

So – up to this point we know the planned CRM system is a mess and no one is sure just how the mess is going to get cleaned up.

The report that was “received and filed” goes to city council at the end of the month.

In part two we learn just how deep the problem is and we learn that Staff want council to be “noses in and fingers out”. Sheila Jones basically refuses to give Councillor Sharman what he wants.

The question that hangs in the air is:  Is this really a Change Management problem or was it a monumental screw up with no one prepared to take responsibility.

Part two follows;

Related news story:

How Results Based Accountability was introduced in 2014.

Councillor Kearns raises the first red flag the public saw on the CRM problem.