By Pepper Parr
February 18th, 2020
BURLINGTON, ON
Part two of that awkward Audit Committee meeting last week.
City manager Tim Commisso defending staff and the serious problems with the CRM system.
Commisso kept coming back to the statement that being a city that understands, accepts and embraces change is where we need to be – adding that “we are not there yet”.
The Mayor said she will want to see regular reporting back on where Change Management is working – she wanted to see that come from the CSRRA committee.
Councillor Sharman then asked what the Customer Service Strategy actually was. Jones said she couldn’t answer that question – she was the Auditor and handed it off to Angela Morgan who was implementing the Customer Service Strategy when the city first committed to CRM.
Morgan explained that the city had hired AtFocus to help create a Customer Service Strategy for the city. With that report in hand the city then went looking for a software solution that would make the strategy a living service.
The City chose a solution developed by Rock Solid Technologies (RSTI), which is specifically designed to address customer relations management within small to medium-sized municipalities and is integrated with Microsoft Dynamics. The solution, containing Customer Relation Management (“CRM”) and Knowledge Base (“KB”) components, is branded as RESPOND and is designed to centralize the City’s customer contact centre.
The city then re-engaged Rock Solid to do the tactical plan for the implementation of a CRM service adding that they will be reporting back to staff on that early in March.
Councillor Sharman wanted to know ‘who was providing guidance to our team?’
This wasn’t giving Councillor Sharman the comfort he was looking for. He wanted to know who was providing “guidance to our team” saying he wasn’t at all sure there was a Project Management Plan. He didn’t ask Morgan what the difference was between the Tactical Plan she had coming to her and the Project Management Plan that Sharman believed was essential.
Who was guiding the design and the implementation of the design? asks Sharman
Commisso cuts in and explains that “we did have a vendor and we also had some lady working with us.
Fabi Karimullah explained the structure that was used to handle design and implementation issues when they cropped up that involved Business Process Management and Business Process Reviews – all in collaboration with the vendor
Sharman came back with. “I’m still not getting the answers to my questions and asked: Did we have any guidance from the very beginning; seasoned CRM specialists who have done this dozens of times before and would help staff through or did we just make it up?
Jones added that the city had engaged the vendor as an implementer.
Sharman cut in and said: Who would do that?
The room got very quiet.
From the left: Project Manager Fabi Karimullah and Executive lead for Customer Experiences Angela Morgan
Angela Morgan then said there wasn’t the needed buy in at every level – it is a change management situation and we are dealing with it.
She added that there are people in Service Burlington who are really excited and love working with it.
The pause that is taking place is because there was some background foundational work to get done – she didn’t elaborate on just what that work was.
Lisa Kearns told the Audit Committee that this was a very awkward meeting.
Kearns wanted to know: How are we going to untangle the buy in problem and the Change Management problems?
As Councillors we were told that we were going to use the system and that people would email us at ward2@burlington.ca in my case and everything would flow from there. The email sent to ward2 never got to me it went somewhere else to be resolved.
“I went along with that. But the experience didn’t feel like the experiences I had when I was procuring CRM services and when I was involved in implementing them.
“I want the city to help me untangle this mess.”
City manager Commisso said he would untangle it for her admitting that it was a mistake to put city Councillors at the front end of the roll out – without all the city departments involved there was going to be a disconnect.
That there was.
Commisso then added that the relationship with the vendor was that of a partner which was supposed to make it all right.
Partners have skin in the game. There is an upside reward for performance and penalties when targets and expectations are not met. No mention made of rewards or penalties for the vendor.
Commisso did say that the city could have put more into it.
The tough part for Commisso is that this wasn’t a situation he created but it is on his desk and he is going to have to work hard to clean up the mess. He thinks he is going to need as much as 18 months to achieve that.
The mess was former city manager James Ridge’s parting gift to the city. He was ushered out the door the day after the new city council was sworn in.
Kearns wasn’t a part of the city council that approved the project – she was a Councillor who had to deal with it and was looking for a level of agility to become part of the corporate culture with no gotchas or looking for people to blame but instead looking for possible positive outcomes.
“We are having a very uncomfortable conversation” she said – “we need to pivot to a more positive place.”
Councillor Sharman was going to close out the meeting with some very tough words for Staff. He wanted to know where the Project Management Plan was, where were the Gantt charts, the time lines. He wanted to see the “who does what when list created by people who have done this sort of implementation more than a dozen times.”
“Change management is part of this but Project management is the core; identifying the roles and responsibilities along with the implementation methodology.
“Where is the Project Management Plan?” asked Sharman. “Where was it, can we see it; was it that complex or did we just start off down a path and stayed on that path?”
Sheila Jones had just told Councillor Sharman that it would be inappropriate to give him the Project Management plan he wanted. He suggested there may not even be a Project Management report.
Sheila Jones was not going to give Sharman what he wanted saying that the transition and the turn over was a part of the problem adding that “it was unreasonable for an Audit committee to hand out a Project Management plan – that would be a “fingers in” approach when what Council should be doing is a “noses in” approach.
Giving the Committee a copy of a Project Management Plan wouldn’t be appropriate or helpful.
“Management has taken the Audit report and taken action” said Jones.
Councillor Sharman’s response was direct and close to brutal: “Ok, so I understand you to be saying it is none of my business.”
The room went suddenly quiet
Mayor Meed Ward moved the report – it was to be received and file.
Council comments followed with Kearns asking: “What is Customer Service to us. People don’t like be treated as a ticket number. Customer Service has to have a community lens and we don’t have that now adding that she has little comfort with where things are now.”
This all comes back to city Council on the 24th. Will council buy the argument that it is a Change Management issue or will they look for deeper systemic problems and hope that with Sheila Jones at the helm and Tim Commisso riding herd on the work Angela Morgan has to get done the problems will get resolved. He wants 18 months to do all that.will resolve the problems. Council will be in the third year of its first four year term. Is this an election issue?
The Audit committee does not include every member of Council; several that we talked to had not watched the web cast.
They have work to do.
An observation: Throughout the two hour Audit Committee meting there was never an occasion when Councillor Sharman, the committee chair was directly in front of the web service cameras. It was difficult to capture decent images of him as he made strong arguments for a different approach. Is the Councillor camera shy? And has he asked the audio visual specialist not to zoom in on him with the cameras?
Related news story.
Part 1 of the Audit Committee meeting on the CRM system.
Below: Sharman at work in council meetings. He can be very effective.
You say that “The mess was former city manager James Ridge’s parting gift to the city.” Well, really, it was the former Council’s gift to the city. Councillor Sharman was a member of that Council. Did the former Council not approve this plan? What questions did he ask then?
Oh now there’s an inconvenient truth. Councillor Sharman would have made an excellent “champion” of the CRM initiative. An even better one would have been the Mayor.
The foundation of any project of any size but particularly a large and complex project, such as the CRM, is a project management plan. This is fundamental – project management 101. How all those sitting around the table, particularly the staff who are entrusted with managing the initiative, don’t realize this is shocking. It is absolutely no surprise that this initiative is in so much difficulty. One could go on almost endlessly regarding how this should have been structured and the fundamental mistakes that were made from the very beginning. It is a change management project true, and this makes it all the more challenging and needing of clear direction and control. If they don’t realize this now, then this will continue to be a complete muddle. Unless project roles and responsibilities are clearly defined and clearly assigned, then nothing good will happen. This is where you name names. The lack of clarity appears to be a major contributing cause of the problem. And isn’t it just so indicative of the lack of transparency and accountability that seemed to be a characteristic of past operations at COB. Has this changed?
For what it’s worth.
Good details Blair.
I would add that a Project Charter would be the foundation of any project. It SHOULD NOT change over time. It identifies the objectives of the project, the goals, the constraints, stakeholders, risk identification, benefits and budget. It is referred to as the North Star to ensure project success.
Whereas the Project Plan is a living document, it is updated daily / weekly.
I would question the value of providing a project plan to Council. They are not CRM experts and let alone project management experts (maybe C. Sharman knows a little about PMing). Council should be part of the stakeholder committee. They should be informed, but not involved at the granular level of a project plan.
I don’t know what a Ghent chart is; I presume the article is discussing Gantt charts?
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gantt_chart
Editor’s note: Our error.
So let me see if I got this right, it is going to take 18 more months to fix the CRM “solution” developed by “Rock Solid”?According to their website “Rock Solid Technologies is a Microsoft software development company ranked as a leader in government solutions.”. Hmmm, so why did the wheels come off here at COB? Its not like we are buying street cars from you know who. Unacceptable I say. The fix if we are lucky, will probably arrive just in time for the next election cycle. Too late, sorry.
https://www.rocksolid.com/
From the limited information I have available to me through the Gazette, the vendor (Rock Solid Technologies) messed this up. They were hired because of their ‘expertise’. They are the ones who should have been been sending up yellow cautionary flags, and if those weren’t headed, send up red flags around missed objectives, missed deadlines, and if needed, underperforming staff. The City staff should have listened. The remedies identified and implemented before this project became the kerfuffle it is.
System implementation can be a challenge. Change management is not easy. That is why you identify Risks up front and develop a Risk Mitigation Plan prior to starting the project.
Fault is on Vendor. If the Vendor is not culpable, then it falls to the City’s PM for not addressing issues in an effective, timely manner. And the City’s Project Champion. Who is who by the way? Tim Commisso?