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Open letter to Dr. Chan on the GSM, September 5, 2008

Dear Dr. Chan, We would like to thank you for the meeting you called with us yesterday. Your willingness to seek us out on an issue that has been increasingly disturbing to staff was welcome and appreciated. So too was your willingness to hear clearly and bluntly what we have been hearing from staff, as well as your commitment to work with us to help resolve the situation.

The Global Management System (GSM) was sold to staff and member states on the promise of increasing transparency and accountability. The Staff Association would like to make clear that we support the aims of the GSM and feel that all staff associated with its development, implementation and support, including the Global Service Center and contracted third parties, have worked hard and diligently, fulfilling admirably what they were asked to do under extremely challenging circumstances.

However, based on the evidence of numerous reported observations of specific bugs and problems suggesting some specific design errors reported by staff through actual use, as well as documented evaluations from external consultants, we believe that this system should not have been rolled out in its current state. We say this with no interest in blaming any individual, but in the spirit of transparency and accountability to understand what happened in order to find the most appropriate solutions.

We know that problems with the testing and planning process have been formally documented which, if implemented properly, would have discovered many of the major problems we have been experiencing and have seriously eroded our ability to perform our work. These were formally documented by the external auditor with an explicit recommendation that each of these problem and process areas should be resolved prior to roll out or the organization risks long term problems which will be costly to solve and leave the integrity of the institution at risk.

The external auditor's report was submitted to the World Health Assembly this year and the transcripts of the discussion show that the secretariat accepted and would implement ALL of the recommendations. (See documents: 61st WHA Provisional agenda item 15.1 A61/23 submitted 9 May, 2008 and the transcript of the WHA discussions A61/B/SR/2 Audit and Oversight Matters: item 15 of the agenda.) A summary of these findings is in an appendix at the end of this letter.

We have asked GMG for an explanation, as it appears little of what was publicly committed to was done. So far we have received only silence on this issue. We cannot judge to what degree which if any of the auditor's recommendations were effectively implemented after the promise to member states to do so was made, and leave that your judgment and the users of the system. However, the implications suggest that the circumstances around the decision to go live should be formally looked at by an objective party.

We have heard from key staff members that those who spoke out on the major issues were labelled as 'negative'. This resulted in a dynamic of 'group think', which led to the situation we are currently experiencing. It is a natural tendency with sometimes tragic consequences.

On Wednesday August 27th, during the directors' meeting on the GSM we made the following recommendations on behalf of the Staff Association.

1) The Staff Association's primary concern is the terms and conditions of service of staff. An unacceptable number of staff members have not been paid in the months following GSM roll out and in many cases find themselves working without a contract. The scope and nature of these problems should be reported to staff and exceptional measures should be taken to rectify this situation immediately.

2) Vendors and contractors on APWs are not being paid. This is dramatically affecting the ability of WHO to carry out its work and is risking our reputation and credibility with key partners. The scope and nature of these problems should be reported to staff and exceptional measures should be taken to rectify this situation immediately.

3) Under no circumstances should the system be rolled out to another region until it has been stabilized.

4) The Director General should send a clear letter to member states and major donors explaining why budgets will not be spent and agreed upon work will not be done to avoid individual units offering potentially differing or inconsistent explanations.

5) Understanding that the project is already over budget by tens of millions of dollars, we should regardless clearly articulate the resource gap that needs to be filled to fix the problems.

6) Over reliance on staff donating their time should be avoided as there is little expertise in house in these issues, and two attempts at data cleaning have been left unused by the GSM suggesting that such efforts have historically not been managed successfully.

7) An independent external evaluation should be performed on the development and implementation of GSM. 8) The administration should offer a clear time table on estimated rectification of the major design problems.

9) An independent users group should be established through the Staff Association which would be open to GSM staff and administration but controlled by the users themselves.

10) This group would come up with basic benchmarks from the Users' perspective of minimum functionality they should expect out of the system.

11) GSC staff should not be anonymized in the system to encourage more collegial behaviour on all parties. The Staff Association was pleased to hear in our meeting yesterday, that many of these recommendations are in line with your plans and some are in the process of being implemented.

We understand for instance that GSC staff now are allowed to identify themselves. This is particularly welcome as we have heard directly from GSC staff that too often they have been treated rudely and HQ staff have reported 'feeling like a number'. We would like to reiterate a belief which you share that GSC staff are WHO staff and deserving of equal treatment and respect.

We are also pleased that much progress has been made on resolving delinquent salary payments, but of course we will not be satisfied until 100% of the cases are resolved. We also are pleased that you welcome the creation of an independent users's group for GSM. GMG senior staff have also endorsed the idea, and although no silver bullet, we hope that this will be part of the solution and help allow staff to channel their real frustrations to a constructive end that will improve the system.

We also are pleased to hear that you are in dialogue with the regions to discuss possible revision of the roll out schedule based on our current understanding of the problems and likely timeline for the system to be sufficiently stable. We also understand that your office is drafting a clear communication to member states and donors to explain the situation and ask for their patience as well. We are sure as they have been supporters of GSM that they will understand.

The Staff Association is also mindful of the difficulty of accurately diagnosing some of the problems that need to be fixed. We understand that it is not through any unwillingness to solve the problems, but the complexity and inherent inflexibility of the system itself, as well as the risk of hasty solutions causing further problems, that has led to the apparent slowness of the response.

We feel that staff will be generous with their patience with a more concerted effort to open communication on the problems, their scope, and a reasonable timeline for correction. We appreciate the increasingly open and transparent approach shown by GMG.

All of us joined WHO under the assumption that what we do saves lives. When we are prevented from doing that work, it is more than professional frustration or fear that our own performance will be judged negatively in a 'results based' system. We are concerned for the lives of people whom we affect, whether it is a staff member who is a single mother trying to make rent, or a small business dependent on a contract, or a person living with AIDS in Africa. With renewed action and increased openness, we are confident that staff will support this effort and help make GSM fully operational and a success.

With best regards, Christopher Bailey, President On behalf of the 56th Staff Association World Health Organization

APPENDIX Here is our summary of the auditor's findings submitted to the WHA last May:

1) After three revisions of the roll out deadline, there was enormous pressure to launch.

2) The agreed upon benchmarks for project management methodologies were not followed.

3) Consequently, the testing stage was premature as the agreed upon stages of project management were not followed.

4) Costs were under reported as specific areas funded for GSM were not listed as such.

5) Involvement and user acceptance of critical technical units in the design of GSM was minimal and pro forma.

6) End to end user testing of the integrated system was not done.

7) No parallel runs were planned to be conducted for any module except payroll at the time of implementation.

8) The legacy data used to test calculation accuracy was not a full time logistics run for time and volume. The accuracy of calculations was not validated against real-life scenarios.

9) The hosting contract did not follow procurement rules contravening WHO regulations.

10) User Acceptance Testing was initiated before the system was 100% operational.

11) The go-live deadline did not take into account the lead times for various phases and the prerequisites for moving from phase to phase.

12) Capacity planning for the Global Service Center had not been done.

13) There is an absence of a firm documented and tested disaster recovery plan. No evidence of contingency plans.

14) Lack of knowledge transfer of GSC and IT staff from the systems integrator resulting in potential over dependence on the systems integrator after roll out. This will have unplanned budgetary consequences.

15) Detailed user manuals were not prepared. Training was inadequate.

16) The complexity and scale of work on data conversion was under estimated and actual work did not follow the methods laid down in the conversion document.

17) Historical information should have been available to the businesses through a suitable interfacing mechanism with key legacy systems.

18) Data validation was not embedded into GSM and there was no formal data integrity testing.

19) No evidence that estimation and planning of quality assurance of the converted data would take place.

20) In the absence of a properly documented and tested plan, the evaluation and effectiveness of the system's security features and identification of any weaknesses, including penetration testing for network security, and their mitigation, remains to be addressed.

21) All of these should be rectified prior to roll-out even if that meant further delays. All of these recommendations were accepted by WHO and implementation of the recommendations in entirety was promised to member states.