SAAQclic: Project management experts criticize entire project

The digital transformation of the Société d’assurance automobile du Québec (SAAQ), which led to the catastrophic deployment of the SAAQclic platform and staggering cost overruns, was poorly prepared, poorly managed and deployed too quickly.

A group of project management specialists from UQAM’s School of Management (ESG) outlined the entire digital transformation process of the SAAQ before Commissioner Denis Gallant on Wednesday.

The holder of the ESG Project Management Chair, Alejandro Romero-Torres, accompanied by two colleagues, Sanaa El Boukri and Monique Aubry, presented a series of findings and recommendations in which the issues of lack of competence, poorly defined project and haste, among others, dominated the analysis.

Chaos

The launch of the SAAQclic platform “generated chaos” because “the project definition was incomplete,” explained Romero-Torres. “We tried to save time by moving quickly,” he said. The definition of a project of this magnitude should have been better developed, he said. 

For this group of experts, it will be necessary in the future to require complete and detailed business cases, to systematically prepare “graduated and modular” scenarios and to submit cost, time and risk assumptions to independent validation.

The desire to use an “agile method,” an approach that is probably too rigid for this type of project—especially in the public sector—will need to be governed by specific guidelines, they say. In the future, it will be necessary to include risk analyses in the dashboards submitted to governance bodies and ensure rigorous monitoring of the financial management of projects by clearly distinguishing between the different expenditure items. 

In terms of supplier relations, they believe it is imperative to strengthen internal project management capacity and to clearly separate contractual responsibilities from the design and evaluation of contracts and to control supplier costs.

Competence issues

Professor Romero-Torres also raised many questions related to the competence of stakeholders within the state-owned company. “We can ask ourselves the question: did they not have the technological knowledge, the organizational transformation knowledge, the project governance knowledge, or even the knowledge of the roles they were supposed to play?”

“I’m sure everyone involved in the project wanted to play their part, but was their role clear? Did they have the skills and abilities to be able to play them?” It’s no surprise to hear him recommend ongoing training at both the decision-making and operational levels and the development of internal expertise.

Beyond the SAAQ, the specialists’ brief proposes establishing “a governance framework specific to information resource projects in Quebec” that would therefore apply to future digital transformation projects in the public sector. They also recommend “encouraging a culture that promotes transparency and trust and ensuring periodic, systematic, and public accountability,” which has never been the case in the SAAQ case.

Learning from the past

Alejandro Romero-Torres goes further by proposing the establishment of independent monitoring committees for major projects to “allow the realignment of practices in certain types of projects where we find they are beginning to perform poorly, to also have strategic advice, but above all to learn. This is a major challenge that we observe in many projects, that we do not want to learn from what we have done in the past.”

Earlier, Mélanie Roussy, professor at the School of Accounting at Laval University, had dwelt at length on the role of internal audit, whose mission should normally be to “provide assurance to governance and contribute to the optimization of organizational performance in terms of risk management.”

This audit division, she noted, reports to both the board’s audit committee and senior management, which can be a source of tension. Above all, she said, employees in the internal audit division must not be allowed to “slip under a vice presidency,” which risks causing them to lose some of their legitimacy.

“A skeptical trust”

She also advocated for more intensive and specialized training for board members who sit on the audit committee and suggested issuing continuous audit mandates targeting an organization’s main risks.

Asked about the fact that several witnesses had tried to exonerate themselves by saying they “trusted” one another, she replied that everyone involved in this type of project should have “skeptical trust. We must stop seeing it as something negative when we work in governance, risk management and control and we have a fiduciary duty to soundly manage public funds. Skepticism in trust is healthy. (…) For me, it is the complete opposite of blind trust, willful blindness, willful opacity.”

–This report by La Presse Canadienne was translated by CityNews