Transpo’s Woes Start At The Top: BENN

What Barrhaven East Councillor Wilson Lo has identified is a common theme in many organizations. Managers use the average to disguise the shortfalls.

They use poor (below average) performance with better (above average) data sets to hide the failures.

How a system operates during the low-volume periods should not have the same weight in an analysis as how the system works when it is under a recurring stress. The morning and afternoon rush hours are recurring stress points. The system needs to be designed to meet those recurring stress points.

According to Lo, the system is failing to meet expectations. According to users of the system, in particular those with longer distance commutes, Lo’s description of the problem is understated.

Day ! of my first accounting course, the prof wrote on the black board: “The objective of accounting is to provide complete, accurate financial information on a timely basis, to support business decisions.” To better understand this statement, reverse the order. The business decision is paramount. Those decisions define the nature of the report. The timeliness affects the completeness and the accuracy.

Council, not staff, needs to determine what decisions council must make. Why? Because council have the statutory obligation to oversee staff decisions and performance.

Council should see a report that presents the travel time it took pre-LRT, with travel times by quarter for on-time performance. Cancelled routes must be included in the data because they impact the overall travel time of the commuter. The report should differentiate between short, intermediate and long routes. It should present travel times for those on single rides and routes designed to feed into connecting rides. In short, the reports should be designed to help identify the specific areas that need to be improved. Very simply put, if council doesn’t know where the weakest points are, how is it able to evaluate whether staff is deploying the limited (a key concept) resources properly.

That staff chose to mislead council, and that is what they are doing by presenting reports that disguise the poor performance at peak usage times, is a problem. That so many councillors either don’t understand that they are being willfully mislead, or don’t care that they are being willfully mislead, and are not willing to challenge (in a respectful manner) staff to do a better job is an even bigger problem.

As is often the case for, the problem does not start at the bottom. It starts at the top.

Ron Benn, a finance executive, has been a member of the Centrepointe Community Association for the better part of three decades.

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