The 311 Podcast

S2 E2 - Reinventing Government Payroll Systems with Alex Benay

• Guest: Alex Benay • Season 2 • Episode 2

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From Ashes to Solutions: The Phoenix Project Revisited

Today, my guest is Alex Benay.  Alex has recently returned to the federal service of Canada to lead the modernization of Canada's federal payroll system.  Starting in 2009 and launching in 2015. The Phoenix project was meant to replace a 40 year old technology stack and save millions of taxpayer dollars each year.  However, after launch it quickly became apparent that there were major inconsistencies and gaps in paying Canada's, 290,000 federal civil servants.  The project has continued to be a black eye for the government and costs have continued to bloom.  This is the kind of project that most people stay far away from. But Alex is no stranger to courageous initiatives.

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Recorded in September of 2024

This is a show about the people that make digital public service work. If you'd like to find out more, visit northern.co/311-podcast/

We're going to keep having conversations like this. If you've got ideas of guests we should speak to, send us an email to the311@northern.co.

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Paul Bellows:

This is the 3, 1, 1 podcast. I'm your host, Paul bellows. This is a show about the people that make digital work for the public service. If you'd like to find out more. Visit northern.co. Today, my guest is Alex Benay. Alex has recently returned to the federal service of Canada to lead the modernization of Canada's federal payroll system. Starting in 2009 and launching in 2015. The Phoenix project was meant to replace a 40 year old technology stack and save millions of taxpayer dollars each year. However, after launch it quickly became apparent that there were major inconsistencies and gaps in paying Canada's, 290,000 federal civil servants. The project has continued to be a black eye for the government and costs have continued to bloom. This is the kind of project that most people stay far away from. But Alex is no stranger to courageous initiatives. As Canada's former chief information officer Alex has also held global leadership positions with Open Text and Microsoft. He's known as a change maker and a disruptor. But this initiative may well be his most significant contribution to the effective delivery of government services. As he makes clear, this is something Canada can't fail at. I think you'll appreciate Alex's refreshingly people first take on technology projects as well as his fearlessness and humility. Here's my conversation with Alex Benay.

Alex Benay:

My name is Alex Benet. I'm the one of the three Associate Deputy Ministers here at Public Services and Procurement Canada. Amongst a few things, my job is mainly quote unquote pay, which turns out is more than pay. It's HR, it's data, and it's actually, mostly about people and culture, good and bad. So that's my job. I've been in and outta government my whole life. Don't really agree to fitting in a box in an org structure, which government is very good at that, but I'm not, so I need breaks. I was the CIO of Canada, left for four or five years, did Microsoft, KPMG around the world, and then came back to Canada. One of the things that, through conversations was that yeah, they still had this Phoenix problem and they still had other problems in tech. It's a big organization, the Government to Canada. So it's normal that it has this stuff, by the way. Like banks are the same, they just don't talk about it. But the Phoenix thing, I actually think it's one that's fixable. It's just, it's gonna be a long haul. Payroll transformation is never easy. I think for the people that actually have suffered from this, I came back'cause I think they deserve better than that. And so to me, the mission is just the coolest ever. But it's actually not fixing Phoenix. It's fixing how we deliver. And I told everybody that from the beginning. This isn't about fixing Phoenix, ultimately it is. But it has to be the use case to fix other things that create Phoenixes for us.

Paul Bellows:

Yeah. How do we not get to the next Phoenix? So I wanted to get to two things that you said. So first I love that you compared it to a bank because we all pay user fees to a bank. They're taking our money and they're running bad technology projects and good technology projects. Federal government also takes some of our, the public's, money.

Alex Benay:

They do.

Paul Bellows:

It does bad and good technology projects. One of them hits the media a lot more though. I'm gonna imagine that there's someone listening to this who we talked about Phoenix, and they're like, what? The, the bird, in Harry Potter? What are we talking about? Phoenix is the codename, the internal project name for a payroll transformation project. What's the actual nature of the project? What's happening inside it? Why is this hard?

Alex Benay:

Yeah. The initial goal was to consolidate and reduce the amount of compensation advisors in the Government of Canada down to about 500, by introducing this great new software back in 2016, 2017. We code named Phoenix, which for any of the technologists that will listen to your podcast, you should never name a tech project Phoenix. I keep reminding people of that.

Paul Bellows:

Something that burns down on a regular basis.

Alex Benay:

Yeah. In our case, hasn't gotten back up very easily, so don't tempt fate. Things went awfully wrong, like basically everything you could do from a leadership perspective failed. We tried to harvest savings before proving the technology work. We didn't transfer clean data. We didn't do enough testing. There's enough audit reports. Anybody who wants to dive into Phoenix will find the Auditor General's reports, Goss Gilroy is another good one that people should probably read if they're interested in diving into this. But essentially everything we could have done wrong, we did wrong. And for the last eight years, seven years, we've been kind of trying to make things worse, work as best we can. It's easy to ridicule it, it's easy to point the finger at another big government failure. But I have to say like the thousands of people that we've hired that actually slave away at this thing, are using probably one of the worst technology deployments that you can think of and are still managing to pay. Like last year we paid 13.1 million, had 13.1 million transactions or payroll go well, but you're not gonna talk about that. You're gonna talk about the other ones that didn't go well. But the other side of the problem is there's about 1.6 million of those transactions that require manual interventions because the system is bad or because we thought that through goodwill departments would send us data on time and clean. We know that there's no amount of goodwill that buys you clean data and good process standardization. So that's what we deal with on a daily basis. Now we have about 30 HR systems, it's gone down over the years, that is feeding one pay system. And people can send us what they want, however they want at the time they want, they try not to, but they always do. And then we have to clean up that stuff and then turn it into a payment, right? So it's just, the problem is because of the scale. If you don't address the issues quickly, it just magnifies. And so it's been magnified and increasing over the last seven years. Now there's a solution and there's a way off of that, we could talk about that. But it, frankly, it took us a long time to get to a point where we admitted it was a failure in the first place. And that's probably the biggest, if you can't admit it's a problem, you can't fix the problem. We just wanted to try to fix it so badly that, you know, we just couldn't admit that it gets to a point where you have to be able to say, this isn't gonna work. And we've been able to do that in the last 18 months, and as a result, I think there's been some pretty good progress.

Paul Bellows:

So I think root cause analysis is the core tech skill that you need, and when you don't have root cause analysis, when you don't know what's actually wrong, you can never fix a problem. But you talked a little bit about scale, and I'm curious, can you just quantify a little bit, some folks will think, oh, the Federal Government of Canada, Canada's not necessarily that big a place, but our Government is a little bit of everything, right? Like we're everything from park rangers to folks in offices here in Ottawa.

Alex Benay:

Teachers, administrative workers, correctional officers

Paul Bellows:

yeah.

Alex Benay:

Border guard agents, military personnel, you name it. So, it varies, let's say roughly 400,000 different federal employees, give or take, at the moment. And dozens upon dozens and dozens of different departments who all think they have to do HR slightly differently and therefore try to. Square, multiple square peg meets one round hole is sort of the nature of it. So yeah, the scale is quite large, at least by Canadian standards, but probably by any standard, frankly, when you get to this amount of scale. It is quite big and it is quite diverse. And it is complex. So it's not to make excuses, it's just that's the nature of the beast.

Paul Bellows:

Complexity, I think, is a really important word. There's the Cynefin model of problem definition and I love Jim Snow's definition of that, which is: complexity is, no one person can do this on his own, and there is no existing solution we can take off the shelf for making something that's novel. And when you have those two conditions, that's how he defines complexity.

Alex Benay:

Yeah.

Paul Bellows:

Which seems to be playing here. You talked about 30 different payroll systems, all getting unified into one piece of software. And these payroll systems have been configured and changed and improved with all kinds of regional, and we have multiple languages here in Canada and very diverse regions, who probably don't ever talk to each other. So I would imagine you're walking into, essentially 30 pieces of completely bespoke, unique software that have been around for decades. Am I right with that?

Alex Benay:

Yes and no. They're all very different, right? One organization will use SAP, another organization will use Oracle. This other organization will use Oracle, but slightly different than this organization. They're on different versions, so at least they're not completely bespoke on the HR side.

Paul Bellows:

Yeah.

Alex Benay:

The challenge I think with Phoenix is mostly a cultural one. We have a culture that maybe veers on the entitlement a little bit too much. And what I mean by that is, well, we're so different, right? That we have to have this thing different because it works for us.

Paul Bellows:

Yeah.

Alex Benay:

But it doesn't work for the end user, which is the civil servant who's not getting paid.

Paul Bellows:

Yeah.

Alex Benay:

Because if we all agree that that's the real mission and that's the real goal, so whether you work in hr, compensation or other places, we would just probably willingly all do the same thing easily in order to pay the end user, which is the person not getting paid. That hasn't happened yet. The good news is I think we've got enough alignment now between all of our central agencies and our senior leadership to say enough. If you're gonna be different, you better be really different. So I'll give you an example. The Canadian Coast Guard, everybody's heard about how different and complex they are. The Canadian Coast Guard is no different than a grocery store because the system doesn't care that you are in a Coast Guard or in a grocery store. So when I hear things like, we have these 10 or 15 minute acting rules that are really hard to calculate, and we have all these different unions. Okay, a large grocery chain in Canada, the clerks at the cash, which was my son for a while, wants to go out on a Friday with friends and it's Friday afternoon and changes his shift at last second, they still got paid on time and accurately. One of the large chains has over, I think, four dozen unions in Quebec only in one province. So we have to stop saying that we're so different and that we can't actually take a piece of software and change what we do,'cause otherwise that's where the entitlement comes in. And do what the rest of the world does, which is use the software the way it was designed. Because at the end of the day, like hiring is, hiring is, hiring, right? So an easy example for that is we've put some unified actions for pay in place of late to try to bring the town, quote unquote, on the same page, and it's you will not hire on any other day except Thursday after pay. It's no different than when I started at Microsoft. It's no different, back in the two thousands and nineties when I was at OpenText, you get hired the day after pay. Why? So you don't mess up the payroll. Like it's pretty simple. Yet we hire whenever we want because our things are so urgent. So it just gets back to the cultural entitlement that we have. We have to stop that. Because there's outcomes that are more important than what, how different we think we are.

Paul Bellows:

So changing culture, I love this'cause, often we look at technology as, it's just code.

Alex Benay:

Yeah. This isn't a tech project.

Paul Bellows:

No, it's a cultural project, right.

Alex Benay:

It's a hundred percent a culture project.

Paul Bellows:

So you get brought back into the federal government of Canada, you've gone out to Microsoft and you've seen that the unique private sector dysfunctions that exist,

Alex Benay:

Everybody thinks it's public sector that's dysfunctional.

Paul Bellows:

No, it's everywhere. It's everywhere. Yeah. Absolutely. It's not better, I'm like, who pays Microsoft? Right?

Alex Benay:

And for the record on your podcast, any other private company not picking on Microsoft.

Paul Bellows:

No, exactly. Any private company including my own. So when you get into a culture change project and you start to identify, this code can be fixed, there are rules that exist here that can be codified. And turned into code, requirements and code, and this can be built and scaled, but first we have to change culture. So first of all, sitting in a tech seat, how do you start to change culture? What is your mindset about that? How do you approach that problem?

Alex Benay:

Yeah, that's a great question. One of the reasons I, I didn't, I didn't burn out last time. I was CIO of Canada, but I got tired at some point, was because like everybody's like, well, you have to change the culture of IT and Government. And I was like, okay, all right. I'm gonna change the culture of government, brand new job. Let's go, rah rah.

Paul Bellows:

Because it's culture that needs to change, not the whole rest of the organization.

Alex Benay:

Exactly. And then I started realizing, wait a minute. Like these things are all designed through different mechanisms that are way upstream from anything I can control. So now I have to change the culture of government, and then I was like, they have like 150 year head start on me.

Paul Bellows:

Yeah.

Alex Benay:

And we do things the way we do'em. I'm not gonna say for a reason, but sometimes through inheritance and it's not easy to change. So in the case of the project here, what was appealing to me was like, okay, this is something I can, to an extent wrap my arms around a bit more.'cause it's more precise.

Paul Bellows:

Yeah.

Alex Benay:

Okay. So problem one. How do you wrap your arms around it? So the good news is I mentioned alignment earlier. I don't think that the head of HR's office, a Treasury Board secretary, which is the department that takes care of all of our administrative policies and central directions and strategies, and our department on the execution level has ever been more aligned. So there is no daylight between the two organizations when they're in negotiating things for new employment terms, we're at the table. When we can't jam any more changes in our schedule, we're asking them to prioritize. That's never existed before. So step one is like get the ownership of the business and sort of the technology people in the room together. And it sounds simple, but we don't do that. We don't throw people in a room multidisciplinary-aly, sort of thinking together and then say, you're not walking out. Here's a pizza box, a deodorant and a toothbrush. The door's locked. I'm sure that violates a lot of collective agreements and human rights, so probably can't do that. But it should be that draconian, right? This is a massive problem. Fix it We were able to start doing that. So that's thing one. Then we got more of the central agencies on board, or with whoever controls the money or Prime Minister's office through our privy council office. Everybody's on the same page now. So that was step one, I think. Step two is like the extended group of people that you can, at a senior leadership, because ultimately this has been a senior leadership failure. This has been an inability to pivot. Because we don't have enough people that have diverse experience sets we were not able for seven years to come up with different solutions. People realize that now. Okay, great, so now we can fix it. So, but like having those first conversations are hard. I remember starting off saying, this is a culture project, not an IT one. Our culture needs to change. Everybody's looking at me like, heck no, our culture's great. I was like, well, let's see. So you start throwing things out as a test and then you start adjusting. And then the other part, I'd say the third part of that equation is once you've got everybody, sort of, on the same page, you have to be radically transparent about what you're doing. And that as well has been a shift. We now have a program in place called Transparency by Design, which is like most of the documents we produce are available to the public. We started releasing those. So available now I think is the month of June, meeting minutes of Deputy Ministers or Records of Decisions architecture, third party reviews. It has to be made public like this, this blunder of ours is costing Canadians. We have to make this transparent. We have to show that we can make a little bit of progress and gain a little bit of trust in the process, even if it is incremental. And frankly, I'd rather be incremental than Big Bang'cause we know the cost of that. So getting the business and the tech together, getting the culture decision nailed down with some of the senior managers in town, and then putting the plan in place and being radically transparent about it. We meet with media once a quarter, meet with all staff once a quarter, all government staff, encouraging our own staff to talk about their stories. That's next. Keep us honest and here's where we're messing up and here's where we're doing well I think through that. you'll at least be able to create momentum. Change culture, I don't know.

Paul Bellows:

Yeah.

Alex Benay:

But create momentum. I think so.

Paul Bellows:

One other framing of culture that I like, that I've inherited, this is not in my creation, culture is what someone, what a person in the organization believes is possible and necessary. Those two river banks and then like culture is all the stuff you do in the middle of those two river banks. What is something that you believe should be, or that you wish to be possible here in the federal service around a project like this that maybe let's say 10 years ago, when we started down this road wasn't possible for an individual.

Alex Benay:

I'll just pause culture for a second.

Paul Bellows:

Yeah.

Alex Benay:

Go back to the tech part. I remember when this thing came out, we have 80,000 rules and I remember being like, okay. Well, it's not that many actually, 80,000 rules. To me is, like Amazon is a pretty big company in like a hundred and what, 40 countries with 140 sets of laws and then policies and then unions in some cases and they still pay people.

Paul Bellows:

Yeah.

Alex Benay:

I never bought the rules excuse. We started this project by saying we have our current engine that has a hard time, not just with the amount of rules. Sure.'cause it's older tech. But how we designed it and implemented it was not good. And then we have this new piece of technology with Dayforce, a Canadian provider, that is built to withstand many, many, many more rules than 88,000 with automation with a bunch of other stuff in there. So to me, as we build things out, as we build our AI solution for the backlog, we're showing it as we're building out Dayforce. We're about to show it come December. To say like it's not that complicated. Program the schedule of the officer, the shift's officer, and press a button on your phone, if they have connectivity, that's a different conversation, sure. But like it's not that hard. So showing the thing on the tech front and how seamless it is, creates two things on the culture front, either, holy crap, this is gonna be great. And we're seeing that from the end users. We've done an engagement with about a thousand people in a room, like multiple rooms.

Paul Bellows:

Yeah. And the end users are like, yeah, this is great. But then the people that are impacted by how the system's gonna change their work, is the flip side of the culture, which is this isn't gonna work. And I can't blame them'cause we didn't do it properly eight years ago and we told'em eight years ago, don't worry, you're not gonna need as many people to do the work. It's gonna be great. This new ERP system's coming in it's gonna do all the work for you. And guess what it's not true. We've had to like dramatically increase our compensation advisors. We've had people sleep under their, their literally their offices over the course of the rollout because just to get pay out the door, super human effort. So I don't blame them for being hesitant and reticent about, yeah, okay. I've heard this song and dance before. So the goal here is to show the thing evolve all the time. Because at some point you get to a point where if it's working and it's demonstrable, uh, sorry, that's my French Canadian side sticking out. Then what are you gonna argue? Yeah.

Alex Benay:

Because if you're still arguing, then it's you. But we have to get to that point. We have to earn that. And that's sort of what we're starting to do now, is to earn that. I'll call it respect or trust, I guess.'cause we do operate in a trust deficit. So the tech stuff eight, 10 years ago is not the same. The ability to show it is not the same. Then the ability to engage online is not the same. So if we're not using the modern tool set and expecting that we're gonna fix the problem by just hiring more humans and using a bad ERP system, then we deserve failure. So we're trying to kind of pivot that a little bit.

Paul Bellows:

I don't wanna miss putting punctuation under the Canadian government is using Canadian technology for payroll I love that. Thank you. That's great.

Alex Benay:

As an entrepreneur, I'm sure you appreciate that.

Paul Bellows:

Absolutely. It's good. Also that a Canadian company had built software that was good enough for the federal Government of Canada to use.

Alex Benay:

Enough for Accenture globally to use...

Paul Bellows:

Absolutely.

Alex Benay:

in other places. The deputy chief Human Resources officer and myself just came back from a trip to Europe to visit all of their Europe customers without Dayforce in the room.

Paul Bellows:

Yeah.

Alex Benay:

And they loved them. They absolutely love the engagement model. Like it actually feels like it's a Canadian company doing Canadian engagement with their customers, which is kind of cool.

Paul Bellows:

Excellent.

Alex Benay:

So they've been, they've been fantastic partners so far. Like, listen, the turbulence is up ahead for all of us. We have to design and test a bunch of things together and there's some gaps on the product side, but to your point, there would've been gaps anywhere.

Paul Bellows:

Absolutely.

Alex Benay:

But those gaps can be addressable through cloud extensions, which they're building and they've been proven that they can build and run, and they've done that with us last year. But it feels pretty good. And they're backed up by, two good companies in EY and CGI and it was all the most transparent procurement I think I've ever run or ever seen run globally for tech. When we did this, four or five years ago, it was through bakeoffs, not binders and we'd co-designed with the suppliers each round and each round we eliminated one until there was only three, two or three standing. And over the course of it, Dayforce came out the winner.

Paul Bellows:

Just to pivot from culture for a little bit, to get into the actual how we make the sausage, that, that side of things. Which isn't always pretty,

Alex Benay:

It's hard to make sausage.

Paul Bellows:

It absolutely it is. I know some excellent sausage makers back home and I appreciate their craft.

Alex Benay:

Yeah.

Paul Bellows:

So you've got multiple external vendors. You've got, let's say a backlog, 80,000 unique requirements. You know, that's a, a bit of an oversimplification of where we're at today. But you're doing real time user testing; you're getting features in front of actual users; you're validating all the removing staplers in desk now part; we're actually gonna change people's day-to-day, style of working that's happening, going to managers who, this is how you will do your job now. Everyone loves to hear that, but all that hard work is happening. What does the actual team in structure of the project look like? How are you building the software?

Alex Benay:

Yeah, that's a great question. When I first started, we had, the next gen project team, those were the folks that were running the Dayforce stuff, the new stuff. Then we had PSPC taking care of the current stuff. So thousands of compensation advisors and hundreds of people running the current platform with IBM and a bunch of stuff. So it is very much a mix of public service employees and private sector folks. The first thing we did was we need to bring all of this together.'cause we're not gonna do a transition by having teams on one side, team on the other side. No handover. So we put one CTO(Chief Technology Officer) in charge of all the tech. That's worked out quite well. We've put somebody in charge of data and AI'cause all the third party reports had said, you don't do any data or AI. And so we wanted to do that. So we started by focusing on that. So we have one assistant deputy minister responsible for that. We have someone in charge of sort of our policy planning. We do have to feed the government beast. You know, there's submissions, there's discussions, there's policy there. So a person in charge of that. And then we have one person in charge of our operations, like our heavy, heavy human operations, like the thousands of compensation advisors. So supporting us is IBM on the current platform, as we all know, and then a mixture of Dayforce, EY and CGI on, the new stuff, which includes, AI in our backlog, for example, which has been run by CGI project office run by EY and Dayforce doing their thing in the product. So yeah, it's interesting because when I started the new technology had never gone to the pay center yet, and I asked why, and I just didn't get an answer I felt comfortable with. So first thing we did was we, told the Toronto gang, you're flying to Miramichi(New Brunswick). And they're like, oh, that's, it's far. Turns out it's not easy to get to, but it was great. And the first meeting everybody, you know, you could sell, everybody had their sitting there with their arms crossed, like the language was amazing. And we were talking about sprinting and agile and a bunch of stuff that I'm sure our private sector friends were used to, but we certainly weren't used to in government. And then the second and the third time, by the fourth or fifth or sixth time, it started getting better. So the thing is you just had to shove'em in a room together. Now, there's still some people with their arms crossed, and I like them because, those are the people that once I convince them or hopefully we do, then it's gonna work. Then I know, like you need those sort of, those people that'll challenge you to the very end and then say, okay, fine, I give up. And I want them to get to that. I want them to say, okay, fine. You know what, I can't think of anything else. Else. So that was interesting culturally speaking, bringing all of these groups together and I don't blame any one group over the next, the new technology team had been told, oh, this is just pie in the sky, it'll never work. The current tech team were like, well, your product is horrible. Everybody brings their scars to the table. So it's been interesting. Now, it's one team, one project around town. It's the first time I can, honestly say that the head of HR could literally regurgitate our project plans. I am not at the level where I could step in for a head of HR. That job is as complex or more probably than mine, but like that alignment is there. The culture and breaking down the barriers is starting to come along just within the team. But at first it was very interesting. It was very turf war. It was very, who's right, who's wrong? I remember asking them a few times if they knew names of some of the victims of Phoenix and nobody did. And then I was like, this isn't acceptable. You can't sit here and defend turf if you don't know who's been impacted. So now what we're working on currently is defining our joint mission statement. I believe in mission over values. Someone's gonna say that's stupid, but if you believe in the joint mission, the values will come. We have public sector values and so it's not like we don't have that stuff, but what is our actual joint mission here? It's been interesting to see the staff sort of from across 6,000 people try to develop that. So it's been fun.

Paul Bellows:

There's two interesting things I I wanna call out and what you've said. And first is you were kind of joking when you said, we wanna lock people in a room with, pizza and a toothbrush.

Alex Benay:

On this podcast, I'm officially joking.

Paul Bellows:

Officially joking, but of course, as a human, you would love the things we'd like to do as humans versus what we could do at our official roles. Yeah. What's below that though is, and you talked about this, is software is our organization now.

Alex Benay:

Yeah.

Paul Bellows:

Software is the codification of the processes we determine. And you can't create a process that doesn't involve software and you can't take software that doesn't involve a process. And you've built a team where those things have finally come together. Like just the fiction that you could do one thing in one room and the other thing in another room and have it work out.

Alex Benay:

And we still do that for the record.

Paul Bellows:

Oh yeah.

Alex Benay:

We are absolutely. I think as a project, an anomaly in the government of Canada. I'm responsible for a couple other projects and I'm like, yeah, we're gonna bring users, us, like real Canadians, us, the supplier of software in a room together, and we're all gonna sit there until, we build a thing and that everybody says it works and everybody says, oh yeah, we've done agile. This, it's a term like, not, not just this government here, like in Ottawa, but it's, it is everywhere in the public sector. And it's called Agile Gas Lighting.

Paul Bellows:

Yes.

Alex Benay:

And it's when, people tell you they've done agile and then you hear them talk and they talk like they're running a waterfall project from the 1990s. We're no different than a lot of major governments that way.

Paul Bellows:

Yeah.

Alex Benay:

But what we're starting to create here is, you have to do the work different if you want a different outcome. Even if you swapped out, Phoenix for Dayforce. If we don't do the work differently, it's gonna be the same outcome, maybe a bit better, but it won't be the outcome we want. To your point about putting'em all in a room together, but that's part of the culture change, right?

Paul Bellows:

Yeah.

Alex Benay:

And, and the civil service, that is our federal government. We value very much policy people and communications people. What gets us in trouble are our operations. Time in, time out, all the time. It's not policy, it's usually not comms. It's our operations that get us in trouble. But that's not what we necessarily value. So now what we're doing is we're putting that on a pedestal. We're saying your operational chops are as important as the policy people over at the center. And they're working together. It's not always easy. We don't always agree, but just the fact we're arguing about something is really good. To your point on the software and the codification, so it's kind of fun to see, let's see where, you know, maybe we have this conversation in a year and we'll see if it worked. If this project fails, it won't be because of Dayforce. It'll be because of our culture.

Paul Bellows:

Yeah.

Alex Benay:

And that's what we have to address.

Paul Bellows:

A gift I got once is from my mom, of course, pay attention to your mom is the key lesson here.

Alex Benay:

Mm-Hmm.

Paul Bellows:

But she got to go to Africa on a project to work. She was doing leadership development in an orphanage project in Africa. So she gotta spend a couple months there and just meet the people. And they went to some villages and she came back with this saying that this out of could only come from an African village, which is this woman said to her, oh, well here, we have a saying, which is you run to the roar.

Alex Benay:

Yeah.

Paul Bellows:

You know, go where the danger is. Go to the hardest place.

Alex Benay:

Yeah.

Paul Bellows:

That's where you're useful. That's where you can actually do something. And I love that that's the mindset here, which is, yeah, there's these big, messy parts that are buried in decades old union rules and softer decisions and organizational decisions and layers of admin. If you don't unpack that, this software will never work. Right.

Alex Benay:

Yeah. If you don't admit there's a problem, you can't fix the problem. And

Paul Bellows:

yeah.

Alex Benay:

Your point on running to rewards the roar, I remember one of the first questions I got was like, how are you gonna recruit people for this? I can't. We have too many people now as in we issued one competition and I think we received 4,600 resumes of people that wanted to come and work on pay. That was interesting'cause it's all, I'd say grassroots, operational level people that want to come and fix this probably'cause they've been impacted themselves frankly, and that's amazing. You know what's interesting is in trying to find senior levels to come here. A lot of them are tired, right? Covid has been hard on people and they did a lot in government and Covid, it's too easy to point to the negative, but the civil service did great. Then I had one senior person say are you actually gonna fix this? And I was like, well, what did you think? I'm offering you a tour of duty to pay. And then you could do your thing and leave and say you've done some operational work on your resume. No, we're fixing this crap. Like we're here to fix it. And so you could just already see the cultural differences between somebody who's probably gone up the rank longer. And who's used to our culture versus the 4,600 people that are like, yes, I'm gonna come in and fix this and roll up my sleeves. The other culture part that's interesting is as we're doing more agile, we're asking directors and managers to make decisions on code. Again, you just see this culture where we punt up decisions. That's what we do. We write briefing notes up to ministers and prime ministers for the last 170 years or whatever we're at now. I lost track. I apologize to your listeners how old this country is. I should probably know that. But that's what we do, we send it up. Now we're like, no, no, no, no. This doesn't go past a director level. You're in the room with the coders. You have to make a decision on the rest of the Government of Canada's operational sort of need for HR on this widget. Sign off and they go, I can't do that. So that's been the other part that's interesting. Again, it's all culture related, right? So it's been super fascinating and the good news is there's no shortage of people that are running towards the fire on this one. So that's been great. Problem is probably have a lot of opinions on how to fix it, and that's fine. They're all welcomed. As far as civil servants wanted to come and fix this thing, at least at the operational level, it's been like a flood gate that we can't, like we have, I have people contacting me all the time that want to come and work here, which is great.

Paul Bellows:

It's amazing that humans actually want good stuff.

Alex Benay:

Yeah. Who knew? We want nice things here. One nice system that could pay us would be great. But yeah, a lot of work still.

Paul Bellows:

So for the Canadian who's on a boat on the ocean out on the west coast, in a storm, the Coast Guard is gonna get paid.

Alex Benay:

To get you. Yes, absolutely.

Paul Bellows:

Yeah. They're gonna get paid and they're gonna be happy and they're gonna come do their job and they're gonna pull you out of the the water. The tide needs to come. Right.

Alex Benay:

Yeah. It's a fundamental right, I think as if, as, you know, as an employee to get paid. So I think, in fairness, again, we managed to get people paid. Sometimes it's taken way too long, obviously, not sometimes, often. So it's this concept of, we're doing everything we can. We've hired more people, but all we're doing is putting fingers in the hole of a boat that doesn't have an engine. And we're wondering why the engine's not moving forward. So it's a float, it's, it's floating. But it, we need to go somewhere with this thing to keep the boat analogy going. And so I think that's what we've been able to do now is create momentum. Our AI engine that we soft launch and are now testing has been a hundred percent accurate in this calculation since day one.

Paul Bellows:

Amazing.

Alex Benay:

And that's been done with CGI, another Canadian company. And they're like, this is the biggest thing we've done on AI globally as far as the precision and the accuracy. But of course it would be like, it's numbers. It's numbers and spreadsheets and reconciliation. Like what? Of course machines are gonna be better than humans at this at some point, and we're already there. So that's gone well, and we've been able to show that. And now we're starting to show some Dayforce stuff as far as what the HR system's gonna look like. We're be in people's lobbies over the winter with iPads and saying, try this, try that, get some feedback and, yeah. I just, to me, this is the funnest project to be on. We're gonna change how we do things.

Paul Bellows:

Right.

Alex Benay:

And prove that we can do it. Anybody that I think works here historically or is coming here, has a chip on their shoulder.

Paul Bellows:

Yeah.

Alex Benay:

And that's great because it's we need to prove that we could do this.

Paul Bellows:

Sometimes you need to leverage those obstinate parts of the human spirit to get things done right.

Alex Benay:

Absolutely.

Paul Bellows:

Yeah.

Alex Benay:

I have zero chip on my shoulders. I've never been accused of that. Ever.

Paul Bellows:

No never, never. Not at all. Not at all. That's not even close to your reputation.

Alex Benay:

I'm very zen. Very zen.

Paul Bellows:

Yeah. Last words then. So, you're sitting in a role, you've taken on what some said was an impossible project. You're getting it done and you're achieving great things. What's your advice to digital leaders who are maybe a little farther back? What does the mindset they need to take as they step into hard projects, things that look like they may not be achievable, or where the're plenty of naysayers saying it can't be done? How do you arm yourself for that?

Alex Benay:

Oh my God, so much to go on. So when you walked in, there's an, there's a poem by Edward Guest, It Couldn't Be Done, you should read it on the way out. It's essentially that to kind of ignore the noise and just go on about your business until you do it. Listen, we have a culture here that's quick to point out what we can't do. So, I would say a few things. I'll get really personal here. When I was 17, 18, I was playing junior hockey and I got hit from behind and I finished the game and then my legs got all tingly and I got to the hospital and I couldn't walk. I couldn't walk for six months. I couldn't talk. Doctors told my parents I'd never walk again. A whole bunch of people telling me what I could and couldn't do. Obviously I'm walking, I'm here today, but it was a long recovery. At 19. I had my first child, everybody's telling me my life was over and what I could or could not do. So for me it's like if anyone tells you, including, the government here as an employee, what you can and cannot do. It's your obligation to challenge that. The biggest risk is to keep doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. And we can be guilty of that at times here, right? Because we're just trying to get that thing up and get it signed and we're not actually looking at how we're working. Or you're gonna get a bunch of people saying you can't do it. I've just now grown up that my limitations are not defined by your limitations Yes. Some people will be like, oh, you have a chip on your shoulders, or, I think Catherine May calls me the Disruptor In Chief since I've been CIO. I argue with that all the time. I'm not a Disruptor In Chief. I just do things the way they've done outside of Ottawa. And I want us to, I think we deserve nice things in Ottawa too. I wanna do nice things here too. Right? But the problem is like we have to change how we do things. So to me, the advice would be if you're working for somewhere that's asking you to walk, like you talk, like you dress, like you hang out in the same places you hang out with to be like you, then you are have one of two choices. You're either going upstream, which is exhausting, or you're gonna comply. But if you comply, you're not gonna get a different result from everything that these other people are doing. We have to have diverse opinions. We have to be able to take in different ideas and, and we say we do, but then the machinery rolls over it. So you gotta get back up after you've been rolled over and try it again. If you're a digital leader in any kind of organization and you're swimming upstream, find your allies. I'm very fortunate I have mine here. I have never seen, PCO, or Privy Council Office for your legal readers can listen up on what PCO does. We've never had a deputy clerk as involved as Chris Fox is on this file. And there are times where I'm sending her an email, say, I need help with this. And the answer is always, yes. I have the same at our Treasury Board Secretariat. People want to fix this, so it's great. So I would say swim upstream, take your breaks, take care of yourself, find your allies, would be another one. And, and make sure that you actually have. It would take a good self-reflection. It took me a month to decide to wanna come back properly in conversations with my wife on like, this is gonna be hard. It is gonna be hard on all of us. Just make sure you have your support network around you because you will go crazy, right?'cause you're trying to change the thing. And I keep remembering, I think it's Jim Balsillie that told me, relentless incrementalism is a real thing. It's actually super important. You can't boil the ocean overnight. So just. What are the steps you could take? Right? So every time I start a new gig, it's like, what are the three things I can put in the window quickly and say, that's what I want. I don't want this stuff anymore. I want that stuff. So find your win. So those are two or three tidbits.

Paul Bellows:

Boiling the ocean one cup at a time.

Alex Benay:

Yeah, that's right.

Paul Bellows:

Yeah, absolutely.

Alex Benay:

Who the hell wants to boil the ocean anyways. Like I think that's getting us in trouble, right?

Paul Bellows:

It's a terrible metaphor.

Alex Benay:

Everyone's eating an elephant. You don't eat an elephant. Nobody eats an elephant.

Paul Bellows:

So wrap up Alex, thank you for the time here. This was great. I think people will really appreciate the human, narrative inside of all this that really is changing people. I think the one ingredient you left out is courage. And I think that that's important here to step into something that's challenging, that's an act of courage. So thank you for your service.

Alex Benay:

Oh, thanks. We should thank the people that have kept the pay system afloat for all these years and their courage. And like I said, people are running into the fire here. It's, it's fantastic. It's not talked about enough, frankly.

Paul Bellows:

Here we go. We're talking about it.

Alex Benay:

There you go.

Paul Bellows:

Thank you.

Alex Benay:

Thank you.

Paul Bellows:

Thanks so much for listening. Alex and the many federal employees and contractors he works with daily are far along on their journey to improve how Canada pays$200 billion of annual payroll. I love the themes he talked about. In particular: There are no impossible problems. We need to put these projects in perspective and break them down to achievable tasks and actions. Two. Technology projects are always people and process first, when we get the order wrong, they often don't deliver on their promises. And three. Leadership in digital projects requires courage, effective communication. Humility and realism. I hope you enjoyed my conversation with Alex. Benay. Please do subscribe and follow the many conversations we're going to be releasing throughout this year. I'd like to thank my colleagues who work with me on this project. Kathy Watton is our show producer and editor. Frederick Brummer and Ahmed Khalil created our theme music and intro. We're going to keep having conversations like this. Thanks for tuning in. If you've got ideas for guests, we should speak to send us an email to the311@northern.co. The public service is about all of us. And when it's done right, digital can be a key ingredient for a better world. This has been the 3, 1, 1 podcast. And I've been your host, Paul Bellows.