Burgeoning Canadian municipalities might want to pay attention
to what the City of Calgary just learned: if you want to get out of
a hole, stop digging.
Calgary's change management team was waist deep "in the vortex
of despair," but looked to process modeling to consolidate the
disparate networks that supply essential city services, according
to Wendy Nadon, a business process consultant.
Nadon was on hand along with other representatives from Calgary
at IDS Sheer's ProcessWorld 2006 conference in Miami this week to
describe a new time and attendance management system that went live
Jan. 1.
"The lesson is, before implementing any software solution, know
what you want to change, the way you want to change it to, and
why," Nadon said. "If we had just automated without looking at what
was really being done, we would have actually made the situation
much worse."
The key system tool - dubbed Aris - was used to implement
Peoplesoft's Human Capital Management suite, and had already proven
its worth before the attendance project, according to Nadon.
Calgary was using a number of other PeopleSoft products,
including tools for human resources, financials and supply chain
management, but they were installed separately over the past five
years without thought to integration, Nadon said.
"(Recently), there was a push to automate a cheque generation
process," she said. "By modeling the process with Aris (Calgary)
found the portion of the process targeted for automation only
accounted for three per cent of the cost of the process."
Principals went back and found the reason cheques were being
generated didn't make sense, she said.
The City of Calgary has 15,000 employees and $1.98 billion in
annual revenue spread across 31 business units, from fire and
police services to roads and parks.
It's a factor change management team lead Stephanie Logan
applied to the time management system redesign.
"The key was getting buy-in from each of the managers whose
business processes would be impacted by the new system," Logan
said. "Having them formally sign-off on the proposed model and
changes before implementation began."
Logan said the city's different business units are very siloed,
with many of them feeling like their own businesses and 16
different collective bargaining agreements to contend with, making
for a challenging situation.
"All of the business rules from our collective agreements had to
be automated into the new system and we didn't realize how much
work that was going to take out of our redesign," said Logan. "If
we hadn't done process modeling upfront we wouldn't have identified
these problems until late in the game."
Rather than modify the technology to fit the existing business
processes, as much as possible the processes themselves were
modified to keep the implementation "as vanilla" as possible,
according to Logan.
"The process model provided us with a blueprint for the changes
[we wanted to make]," said Logan. "A lot of times, when we were six
to eight months into implementation, we would forget why we were
doing something, and we would go back to the process model and say
'ah, that's why.'"
A Calgary-based IDS Scheer partner, Kogawa Consulting, helped
the city through the modeling and training process.
Don King, a principal with Kogawa, said when going through any
process change exercise people are going to be leery about what it
will mean for them.
It's important to remember that behind the process models there
are people, and they need to be brought on board, he said.
"If you don't... they get the impression you don't really care
about them and it makes it that much more difficult to implement
and make it work,'" said King. "If you handle it sensitively to the
people that are in the room usually you can come out with a win-win
solution."
Public sector organizations tend to be more siloed than those in
the private sector, each with their own way of doing business,
according to King. While those unique processes make sense within
the organization, they don't always promote interoperability.
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