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Ottawa’s city managers decide to do things without thinking about what they’ll cost, concludes auditor-general Ken Hughes in a damning set of reports released Thursday.
There’s no real plan for keeping city computer systems from being hacked. In some departments, people with no training are responsible for monitoring cybersecurity. The “risk is significant,” Hughes reported. “When you don’t have training, you don’t know what you don’t know.”
The department that oversees major construction projects sounds like a disaster, with failings in project schedules, budget control, communications, quality assurance and project reviews. These are the people most notorious for botching the construction of the Airport Parkway footbridge near Hunt Club Road and not even realizing it wasn’t getting built.
Get this: Councillors angry about bridges and paving jobs in their wards falling behind schedule demanded regular updates, so the department started producing monthly status updates. It hid them deep in an internal web page, but councillors who wanted them could dig them up. Except that according to Hughes, those updates sometimes leave the planned completion dates in place even when the department knows perfectly well that it’s behind schedule.
Then there’s the fact that although the city’s got a pretty good idea what endangered species live in Ottawa, it doesn’t have any rules for how to take them into account when planning maintenance activities. Which is how it ended up having to stop rebuilding a bridge in Barrhaven in 2013 because the bridge had protected birds living in it.
And how about the accounts-payable department that paid a fifth of the city’s bills late, and threw away $600,000 in discounts for paying them early? Or the call-centre people who count people who hang up within the first two minutes of sitting on hold as successfully served customers?
One common theme: a “lack of financial analysis used in decision-making.” That’s what Hughes put up on a slide as he delivered city councillors his report. Decisions that are big enough to warrant council votes typically get dollar figures attached to them, but not choices city managers make in their own departments.
“I think most people would agree that before you make a decision — we do this in our own personal lives — before you make a decision you ensure there is a valid reason for why you are taking a particular course of action,” Hughes said in a post-report news conference. “First of all you identify what the various courses of action are, and what we’re suggesting, being accountants, is you might want to cost out those alternatives and identify the most cost-efficient alternative.”
Indeed you might. What’s cheapest is not always what’s best, Hughes said, but what something’s going to cost is the sort of thing you ought to check if you’re in charge of budgets in the hundreds of millions.
Hughes also pointed out that although the city has invested heavily in computerization and automation to reduce bureaucracy, “Full efficiencies are not realized or evaluated when new technology implemented.” In other words, they buy the computers and then don’t use them for all they’re worth.
People worried that Hughes would be a pussy cat because he was previously Ottawa’s deputy treasurer, part of the management group he now reports on. Nope.
He did, after some hemming and hawing, decide that overall, city managers deserve an A-minus grade. And fair enough: The streets get plowed and the garbage gets picked up and the librarians don’t steal the books. The people in the payments department don’t send cheques to themselves and their friends. Even the infrastructure-services department eventually got the Airport Parkway bridge built, which maybe explains why its hapless general manager Wayne Newell persists.
Hughes made dozens of recommendations based on his and his team’s findings, and managers led by the city’s top boss Kent Kirkpatrick accepted them all. Indeed they’ve already been working on them, and Kirkpatrick said he’s looking forward to the check-ins that city auditors do after a couple of years because they’ll show major improvements all around.
But if there’s no culture of thinking about what things will cost, despite 15 years of post-amalgamation efficiencies and zero-means-zeroing and stingy Jim Watson’s screw-tightening, that’s not a process problem, and much harder to solve.
dreevely@ottawacitizen.com
twitter.com/davidreevely
查看原文...
There’s no real plan for keeping city computer systems from being hacked. In some departments, people with no training are responsible for monitoring cybersecurity. The “risk is significant,” Hughes reported. “When you don’t have training, you don’t know what you don’t know.”
The department that oversees major construction projects sounds like a disaster, with failings in project schedules, budget control, communications, quality assurance and project reviews. These are the people most notorious for botching the construction of the Airport Parkway footbridge near Hunt Club Road and not even realizing it wasn’t getting built.
Get this: Councillors angry about bridges and paving jobs in their wards falling behind schedule demanded regular updates, so the department started producing monthly status updates. It hid them deep in an internal web page, but councillors who wanted them could dig them up. Except that according to Hughes, those updates sometimes leave the planned completion dates in place even when the department knows perfectly well that it’s behind schedule.
Then there’s the fact that although the city’s got a pretty good idea what endangered species live in Ottawa, it doesn’t have any rules for how to take them into account when planning maintenance activities. Which is how it ended up having to stop rebuilding a bridge in Barrhaven in 2013 because the bridge had protected birds living in it.
And how about the accounts-payable department that paid a fifth of the city’s bills late, and threw away $600,000 in discounts for paying them early? Or the call-centre people who count people who hang up within the first two minutes of sitting on hold as successfully served customers?
One common theme: a “lack of financial analysis used in decision-making.” That’s what Hughes put up on a slide as he delivered city councillors his report. Decisions that are big enough to warrant council votes typically get dollar figures attached to them, but not choices city managers make in their own departments.
“I think most people would agree that before you make a decision — we do this in our own personal lives — before you make a decision you ensure there is a valid reason for why you are taking a particular course of action,” Hughes said in a post-report news conference. “First of all you identify what the various courses of action are, and what we’re suggesting, being accountants, is you might want to cost out those alternatives and identify the most cost-efficient alternative.”
Indeed you might. What’s cheapest is not always what’s best, Hughes said, but what something’s going to cost is the sort of thing you ought to check if you’re in charge of budgets in the hundreds of millions.
Hughes also pointed out that although the city has invested heavily in computerization and automation to reduce bureaucracy, “Full efficiencies are not realized or evaluated when new technology implemented.” In other words, they buy the computers and then don’t use them for all they’re worth.
People worried that Hughes would be a pussy cat because he was previously Ottawa’s deputy treasurer, part of the management group he now reports on. Nope.
He did, after some hemming and hawing, decide that overall, city managers deserve an A-minus grade. And fair enough: The streets get plowed and the garbage gets picked up and the librarians don’t steal the books. The people in the payments department don’t send cheques to themselves and their friends. Even the infrastructure-services department eventually got the Airport Parkway bridge built, which maybe explains why its hapless general manager Wayne Newell persists.
Hughes made dozens of recommendations based on his and his team’s findings, and managers led by the city’s top boss Kent Kirkpatrick accepted them all. Indeed they’ve already been working on them, and Kirkpatrick said he’s looking forward to the check-ins that city auditors do after a couple of years because they’ll show major improvements all around.
But if there’s no culture of thinking about what things will cost, despite 15 years of post-amalgamation efficiencies and zero-means-zeroing and stingy Jim Watson’s screw-tightening, that’s not a process problem, and much harder to solve.
dreevely@ottawacitizen.com
twitter.com/davidreevely
查看原文...
