Central Perspective

Email from PFR general manager Janie Romoff to staff, July 24, 2018:

Subject: A note from Janie: Our next step in making it better - a Council-approved replacement for Class

Note: highlighting is editorial, from CELOS

On behalf of the project team and our partners in the Information & Technology, Purchasing and Materials Management and Legal Services divisions, I am proud to share that yesterday City Council adopted our recommendation that Legend Recreation Software be selected as the new booking and recreation management system for the City of Toronto. Legend's system has been successfully implemented in Hamilton, Halifax and across the UK and other jurisdictions, they will soon implement their system in Ottawa, and they're very eager to get working with us on an implementation plan for booking and registration in Toronto.

When the Mayor stood on the deck of Regent Park Aquatic Centre in March 2016 and announced our commitment to replace Class, he challenged us to make it better for Toronto's residents and the staff who work every day with aging technology to deliver high quality service for our recreation and parks users.

Together, we have worked hard to make it better – we improved pre-planning tools, communications, call centre operations and increased server capacity. We completed 60,000 (40%) more registrations in the first 10 minutes on registration start dates and processed 90% of the registrations online. User satisfaction rates increased and, as a result, we were honoured with the 2017 City Manager's Award.

The selection of Legend Recreation Software and yesterday's approval by City Council marks the next step in our journey together to make registration and booking better:

• With the new system, residents will be able to register for programs and book parks and facilities using an enhanced online platform with a modern and well-designed user interface.

• Program capacity will be optimized and waitlists reduced through automated processes that ensure we're serving the highest number of users in every program at all times.

• Processes which are currently cumbersome and manual, such as account creation and management, will be available for online self-service.

• Residents will receive communications through their preferred channels, including email and social media, and will be able to engage with our services 24/7, wherever they are, using whatever computer, tablet or device they have at their disposal.

• Staff will have access to real-time data that will assist in service planning, business intelligence and the collection of various metrics to guide service delivery.

We know that a change of this size is not easy, and that many of you might be wondering what this means for you and your work in the coming years. We don't have answers to all of those questions yet, but we've built time and resources into the project to ensure we can work with you every step of the way to make this new system a transformative tool in our continued growth and evolution.

We still need your feedback on how this new solution, and changes to our policies and business processes can help to make it better for you and our residents! Your ideas are critical to the success of this project. Send your feedback and ideas to makingitbetter@toronto.ca.

Thank you for your ongoing dedication to our great city and its people, we look forward to working with you in the months ahead.

Janie

Comments:

The price is 34 million over 10 years. My reading is that this price is split into “start up/ change over” costs of about 24 million and 1 million per year as a subscription fee for the service. So, the operating cost of CLASS was $754,000 cheaper per year than Legend (7.5 million over 10 yrs).

Re how much the city will save/increase efficiency by using Legend: Here's what happened with 311 and city rinks: http://www.cityrinks.ca/wiki/wiki.php?n=CityRinks.RinkPhoneNumbers

And FPARS management software was going to be a bargain at $7 million but it was really complicated to then the city bought the SAP version of FPARS -- the cost has now gone past $71 million and as far as we know, it's still not functioning 12 years later.

"Program capacity will be optimized and waitlists reduced through automated processes that ensure we're serving the highest number of users in every program at all times."
Programs are just a commodity like any other product, right?
Like the maximum number of cars coming off the assembly line?

From Budgetpedia:

PFR Revenues: http://bit.ly/2icwRjc scroll to the right. The numbers behind the charts are available if you hit the table icon. 2018-08-20 09.55.33 pm.png

More detail: http://bit.ly/2BtTw8r again, scroll right.

Note that these are inflation adjusted (can be toggled) budget figures, and are up to 2017 (I haven't entered 2018 yet)

Here's the PFR operating budget for 2018: https://www.toronto.ca/legdocs/mmis/2018/ex/bgrd/backgroundfile-111989.pdf

Content last modified on September 22, 2018, at 08:49 AM EST