27 February 2002
Rhoda
Matlow, Director
Social Assistance Municipal Operations Branch
Ministry of Community and Social Services
1075 Bay Street - 6th Floor
Toronto, Ontario M7A 1R3
The City of Ottawa has identified important issues concerning the Service Delivery Model Technology (SDMT). This letter and attachment provide details related to these issues, system deficiencies, areas of concern and recommendations for your consideration. All of these issues have been identified and referred to SAMO through the BTP helpdesk and have not as yet been resolved.
At this time, the manner in which the application processes the information entered into the SDMT and the data/information received from the SDMT is unreliable and unpredictable. The system requires so many workarounds in all areas that staff are unsure which is a workaround and which is a standard business process. This, in turn, affects the credibility and ability of the City to offer effective and efficient delivery of the Ontario Works program.
Ottawa prides itself in the accomplishments of its staff during the planning and implementation of the SDMT. Staff have had to deal with the following system deficiencies while attempting to provide quality services to our clients and to the community at large.
· Inordinate amount of “system bugs” that have hindered our capacity to deliver quality services.
· A complete Provincial shutdown of the system for one day (the impact of this shutdown was compounded in that it occurred on a Friday, on the 1st day of the month).
· Lack of audit security in the granting of benefits.
· Multiple system changes that create havoc with “known” functionality elsewhere in the system.
· Lack of municipal consultation in identifying system requirements.
· Invisible escalation and rating of SIRs.
· Lack of “follow-up” support for municipalities upon transition.
· System “features” that create more work and do not meet our needs nor comply with OW Regulations.
· Inadequate Form 5 Reporting.
· Problematic Service Level Funding Reports.
· Daily Extract specifications that are changed without any notice.
· Lack of established communication network.
The attachment clarifies areas of concern that have tremendous impact on the City’s abilities to deliver the OW Program.
The Social Assistance and Municipal Operations Branch has taken over the responsibility for SDMT and is struggling to provide the City with adequate and timely information on system news and upgrades.
The following are recommended actions the City of Ottawa proposes to assist both parties in working towards solutions that meet the needs of our staff and clients.
· Participation in a visible and identifiable process on SIR ratings.
· Advance notification of System Upgrades.
· Ability to participate in upgrade testing. This could be established by promoting a test environment in CMSMs in order to verify all aspects of proposed changes in order to ascertain primary and secondary effects.
· A training package, similar to the one received for the New Benefit Unit Summary Report, for all 43 Operational/Performance Reports.
· Immediately provide CMSMs the capability to edit system letters.
· Undertake a complete examination of all system-generated letters. The letters need to be reworded in plain language in both English and French and market tested to ensure clients understand the message.
· A commitment to address the outstanding issues related to the Data Extracts.
· Communication to CMSMs of the standard for an acceptable monthly variance between the Financial Reports.
· A designated SAMO contact with whom representatives from the City of Ottawa can raise issues and request follow-up.
· A written schedule to indicate when all monthly reports can be expected.
...3
Please be assured that the City of Ottawa is committed to working with SAMO in order to render the SDMT an effective and efficient management tool for all.
As these matters are of a critical nature, I would request that a work plan be developed within the next few weeks to address these issues. I look forward to hear from you as soon as possible. If you require any additional information, please contact me at (613) 724-4112 extension 24112.
Dick Stewart
General Manager
People Services Department
|
cc: |
Bruce Thom, City Manager, City of Ottawa Susan Bihun, Manager, Municipal Programs and Community
Services, MCSS Linden Holmes, Program Supervisor, MCSS Pauline Carter, Executive Director, OMSSA |
Attach.
SDMT ISSUES
Employment and Financial Assistance Branch
February 25, 2002
· SDMT does not facilitate the granting of unpaid shelter costs in the month of application contrary to OW Regulation 40 (2)(a). Users must override the Eligibility Engine calculation to issue the correct amount of entitlement (which removes the month of application from future eligibility engine calculation). Also, staff are required to perform manual entitlement calculations to arrive at a correctly prorated amount of desired entitlement. Although a ticket was logged on February 8, the issue has been communicated to BTP since August 2001.
· Case Coordinators constantly have to enter incorrect information in order to have the system grant the correct entitlement for clients.
· When granting a manual issue on opening a case, the SDMT gives a warning that the entitlement is already paid when it is still in requested mode.
· There is no way to issue Basic Financial Assistance in excess of entitlement for the current month and have it calculated as an overpayment.
· Pay Directs and vendor cheques stubs continue to show only an invoice number. This is problematic to large Companies (Enbridge, Hydro, etc.) when attempting to credit the proper account.
· The City’s system coordinator must prepare, on a monthly basis, a comprehensive list of pay direct beneficiaries for larger pay direct parties. This client list is the only tool provided to these 3rd parties, which allows them to reconcile the direct payment with a specific client.
· Inability to post manual cheques issued to clients as the system shows the benefits in “requested mode” but will not allow the posting of the manual as it sees the benefit as issued when in fact it is not issued.
There needs to be significant improvement and efficient use of time built into the logging of issues. Currently this is a time consuming and frustrating exercise. We would recommend the availability of an email solution for some issues.
· Prioritization is inconsistent and is without CMSM input.
· The structure in place to report system problems to the helpdesk is very time consuming and frustrating to field staff. CMSMs are required to have office experts call in tickets but the front line staff at the helpdesk have no level of understanding of the issues being reported and field staff end up dictating word for word the problems and/or issues.
· Only certain designated users are allowed to call in tickets. Therefore, it would make sense to provide the provincial list of designated users, their phone numbers, and office/server location to the helpdesk employees to reduce the level of inquisition when logging a ticket.
· We need to receive comprehensive information on the content of the SDMT upgrades at the earliest opportunity in order to analyze the information and communicate the changes to staff. Currently, we receive the detailed information 2 to 3 days in advance of the promotion date and we wait for a SAMO communication the following Monday or Tuesday to confirm if all the promotions were successful before advising staff.
· More care is needed in testing the System upgrades as minor changes in one area affect several other aspects of the system.
· Staff are having a hard time doing their job with confidence as the ground keeps changing underneath their feet.
·
Although SAMO attempted to produce a Weekly Status
Report for SIRs, only two have been produced to date with the second one being
recalled, as it was not accurate. We have so far received a Weekly Status
report for the week of January 14 – 18 only.
LETTERS
· Lack of flexibility in the creation, production and distribution of letters.
· Form letters are poorly worded and formatted. They are unprofessional in appearance and create confusion with the client. The problem is amplified with the inadequate French translation of the letters.
· CMSMs have no ability to overwrite and/or change the content of the letters.
· Massive print files, especially the day after cut off, are problematic in Ottawa.
· We must review letters to ensure their accuracy in relation to the client’s circumstances.
· We have lost the ability to produce bulk City of Ottawa letters via a mail merge function (functionality was included in CWT/CIMS).
· The signature on the letters still defaults to the highest authority in the Branch. It leaves clients confused as all letters have the name of the Branch Director for questions and clarifications. Again, unnecessary workload is created in rerouting the client calls to the proper source.
The staff resources required to manage the receipt, printing, review and distribution of letters are significant and are at the cost of direct client service. The additional distribution costs to the City is also significant.
Operational/Performance Reports
· The retrieval and sharing of the monthly reports are extremely time consuming as one must open and download each report individually. There are 43 reports for each individual office in the CMSM.
· Over 200 monthly reports need to be downloaded and saved into City Directories. This requires one person 4 hours to accomplish on a monthly basis.
· On a consistent basis since November 11, we have received monthly Operational / Performance reports that are either blank, incorrect and/or formatted “portrait” style when the information is formatted “landscape” style.
· Although 10 to 11 new Reports are expected by the end of June 2002 and training material will be forwarded by SAMO for these, formal training needs to be delivered by SAMO for the other 30 reports we have been receiving since Go-Live. The previous “training” received by Ottawa was more workshop than training and was used to gather information by the Reports Workgroup more than to train field staff.
· There exist numerous duplicate clients in the system and there appears to be no way to “merge” or "link" these cases. We have heard of no plans to address this issue in future releases.
· It is far too easy to create a new member ID for a client when they are not found through a proper search. Additional prompts should be added to ensure that users are thorough in searching for previous history prior to creating new cases.
· Unless this is adjusted/addressed shortly, the data in SDMT will be contaminated to the point where no reliable information will be available for reporting requirements.
· It is possible to be Ongoing as an applicant in more than one OW-Reg case. We have seen instances of Applicants with an ongoing status as well as a screening status under the same member ID.
· Due to numerous workarounds required to have SDMT process payments for clients, it will be impossible to review eligibility for this time period in the future, as staff will not be able to explain the various “workarounds” that were necessitated by the January 19th system “enhancements”.
OWT
DATA CONVERSION
Conversion of OWT Employment Data into SDMT must be completed by May 31st in order to ensure proper and accurate service level funding for the City. The time period was established in order for CMSMs to accomplish this task efficiently and accurately. Unfortunately, the provincial reporting tool (PACR) was designed to be most effective for conversions that take place in a short period of time (within 6 weeks) after a Go-Live date.
The provincial direction on conversion requires that CMSMs use the PACR for their conversion and states the following:
“When users stray from, or
do not use these procedures, the Ontario Works participant and funding
information is put at risk. If this
data is compromised, it will be difficult for municipalities to meet the required
year-to-date (YTD) reporting requirements, which includes the budget and target
data required to reconcile performance and funding.”
When
questions are raised for using options other than the PACR, the BTP Conversion
Lead warned the City of possible future sanctions and withdrawal of expert
assistance if we stray from the PACR use.
We
believe a solid business case can be made for not using the PACR to mark cases
as converted without jeopardizing funding issues but our attempts at exploring
the possibilities have been met with obstinacy.
The following are examples of some of the many workarounds performed by staff to effectively carry out their daily duties.
· Preparing a monthly client list on an excel spreadsheet for all 3rd party pay directs (landlords, gas and hydro) allowing them to reconcile social assistance payments with client account numbers.
· The usage of Special Allowance as a default benefit in order to grant correct entitlement to clients in the initial month of grant. This affects all new applicants with the exceptions of those applying on the 1st of the month and those whose shelter costs are paid for the initial grant month.
COMMUNICATION
· A clear and visible communication strategy needs to be developed and communicated to CMSMs in order to avoid the Friday February 15 incident where CMSMs were sent an “Urgent” message after 5:00 p.m. to change their print program before the following Monday. The communication included documents in an “exe” format, which is automatically quarantined by the City upon receipt. This type of document was sent even though SAMO had been previously advised of the City’s “firewall”.
· Key knowledgeable persons at SAMO must be identified and available to CMSMs in order to have an open channel for the exchange of information on an ad hoc basis.
· Presently, CMSMs are inundated with bulletins from various SAMO distribution points. There seems to be no coordinated effort to filter messages prior to their release as some are recalled and rescinded. Occasionally, the same message is sent out twice but from two different SAMO distribution points. This requires an inordinate amount of time to read, analyze, decipher, validate and then, communicate to our own staff.
PORTABILITY
OF OVERPAYMENTS
· Although strong concerns about the implementation date of April 1st have been raised with SAMO by CMSMs, the Ministry is still holding to that date.
· CMSMs are still waiting for the final documentation from Policy Branch. The document is due in February and leaves less than four weeks of preparation time to advise and train staff on the procedures. Although the protocol has been made available, Ottawa must also concentrate its focus on converting the OWT Data to SDMT.
· The present Overpayment protocol is complicated and full of conditional statements, which leaves a lot of room for guesswork on where the CMSMs should be focusing their efforts in order to prepare files.
Explaining and understanding an overpayment created in SDMT is complicated as the overpayment information in SDMT is found on several screens in some instances.
· The November expense report from SDMT did not balance with the cheque register. The difference to be written off was $52,205.68. BTP explained that this was due to it being the conversion month.
· December did not balance by $214.59. We were assured that future monthly reports would balance.
· January was out by $1,072.32. BTP/SAMO considers this amount to be acceptable. We are waiting for a memo from MCSS outlining what they consider to be an acceptable monthly variance between the expenditure report and the cheque register.
· While the total caseload count appears to be acceptable, there are problems with the client type allocations.
· Non-Resident cases taken from CIMS reports have fallen steadily from 1,392 in January to 975 in October. SDMT reported 103 in November, 302 in December and 534 in January.
· The Temporary Care (Foster Children) caseload is now 100% Sole Support and shown separately at the end of the report. CIMS showed the numbers allocated to Regular and Non Resident as well as Sole Support. At this point we are still waiting for confirmation that the problem is only related to the correct allocation by case type but that the total caseload numbers are unaffected.
· The number ODSP clients receiving Discretionary Benefits are not provided but are required. CMSMs must include the number of ODSP cases granted non-health related discretionary benefits to the funding formula, which determines the Ministry’s cost sharing cap.
· We receive daily extracts from SDMT on all cases where there has been a change. We receive only the information that has been changed called a “delta”. Currently we use this information to update our City business application called RSVP. We have encountered many problems as the project has changed the format of the extract 3 times (that we know of) since go live without informing us. This has had serious repercussions on our ability to update our in-house system and has added hours of development and analysis time to our staff workload. The nature of the information received is also problematic as applicants in SDMT can be applicants on more that one Benefit Unit at the same time, a concept which is totally foreign to our system logic. We would like some changes to the format and content of the extracts.
· Payment extracts, which are currently received monthly, are not reflecting daily payment activity, only monthly pay run payments. This makes it impossible to do proper bank reconciliation. From the outset, we were assured that we would receive payment extracts that meet our needs. We still have not.
· The City of Ottawa requires a consolidated Payment extract to update the “Welfare Browser” application, which is currently out of date. As SDMT provides no general search by payment number this is our best tool to determine the current status of a cheque (cashed, etc.). The Welfare Browser also enables us to produce reports on Vocational Training expenditure (by agency, recipient and worker) as well as other expenditure queries required to manage our budget properly.
CASE/STAFF MOVEMENT MANAGEMENT
· SDMT has little of the case management features, which were so useful in CIMS and CWT.
· The major issue we are faced with currently is the lack of SDMT functionality to assist in the efficient transfer of cases between offices. There is no functionality to bulk transfer directly from one case org to another between offices. Each of the 2200 cases that required movement in Phase 1 of our redistricting required an individual transfer from the sending office to a generic File Transfer Case Org. in another office. The receiving office was then required to assign each one of these cases to the appropriate internal case org.
· Bulk movement of staff is also problematic and again the transaction must be completed individually.