Thank you for the question.
There's a lot of detail in there, but I'll focus on the actions moving forward.
We have put our measures into what I would call four buckets, or bigger areas of focus, as we move forward towards stabilization and ultimately a fully functional, integrated HR-to-pay system.
I pause to say how important it is to understand that this isn't just about a piece of software; this is an end-to-end user experience in which the way people input the data into HR systems, the way the HR system then connects and interacts with the pay system, and the way the pay system then generates pay are all connected. We talk about Phoenix, but what we're really talking about is a massive end-to-end HR-to-pay experience. When I use the term “Phoenix”, I'm going to be using it in that broad context, not simply as the PeopleSoft software that is the IT piece of this.
Anyway, of the four areas that we are focusing on, first is our governance and oversight. We're putting rigour and thought into how we are ensuring accountability and oversight, starting with the ministers' working group, then the integrated team led by Les—which is also a partnership with Treasury Board—and then the deputy ministers' oversight committee.
As we move forward, we're going to build and maintain those governance structures. We have a project management office. We are looking at a performance measurement and reporting framework in developing performance metrics. There are metrics that we track already, and have for some time, but what other metrics can tell us that there's continuous improvement and that we're steering in the right direction? We're looking to establish an expert advisory panel, which is well under way.
The next thing is business processes and how we are going to improve them. We're looking at adjusting the pay centre delivery model and implementing the concept—which Les could elaborate on, but I won't, due to time—of pod pilots, whereby we really focus on getting the same group of people to attack the same type of transaction over a long period of time.
We're conducting and assessing a root cause analysis to implement short-term priority fixes, so we're looking to understand not only the root causes of these technological and business process challenges but also what we can do now as short-term fixes. Quite frankly, these could be workarounds or could make a system more clunky, but in the meantime we want to know what short-term fixes we can put in place>
We're doing an HR-to-pay assessment. We're looking at what policies we have to change. For example, is it how we manage acting pay that causes a challenge when that acting pay request is put into the HR system and then flipped to Phoenix? All these different processes have to be looked at under the lens of the end end-user experience, and of course we're looking at the technological changes, challenges, and fixes, if you will, that will have to be put in place.
Increasing capacity is the third big bucket, primarily referring to the human resource capacity. As you've said, and as I've said in my speech, we've already hired 380 people. We're putting in place 300 more to try to augment the human resource capacity needed to actually run these systems. We've created a client contact centre to help public servants get the support they need to navigate this system. We are realigning the IBM contract to add some capacity there—