NEW ORLEANS -- With more than 7,000 open investigations into problematic water bills, the Sewerage & Water Board of New Orleans says a lack of training for its employees on new billing software has caused many of the problems.
Last week, the agency told New Orleans City Council members the software company and previous managers of the board may have rushed to implement the new software. But the S&WB contract with the developer, Cogsdale, delineates how much training the company would provide over an 18-month process.
“The then-current administration of the Sewerage & Water Board signed off that we had everything that we needed, that they had everything that they promised to deliver and whether that's true or not we now know that it was not sufficient,” Interim S&WB Executive Director Jade Brown-Russell told the City Council Public Works Committee, which oversees the board.
Three months after the agency went live with the new billing software, Customer Relations Manager Jacqueline Shine submitted the modernization project for a CS Week Expanding Excellence Award.
They won.
Shine’s letter spells out four tests employees would have to take after their training on the new system. Once they passed the tests, they would be considered "certified".
But the myriad problems with billing that appear to stem from operator error lead the S&WB’s current management to conclude that training wasn’t enough.
Brown-Russell told the City Council committee as much last week.
“My understanding walking out of that meeting was Cogsdale was a clunky system that required more implementation and sewerage and water board didn't get as much training as they needed on the system,” said District A City Council Member Joe Giarruso.
The S&WB has paid Cogsdale $10.2 million to modernize the agency's billing system and to upgrade and integrate a new human resources computer system. The billing portion of that cost $4.8 million, Brown-Russell clarified Thursday.
The added training and further integration of the computer systems comprise the half-million dollar figure S&WB told the council it would have to pay Cogsdale to make it all work.
Brown-Russell said the turnover rate of employees in customer service, who use the software, is some of the highest in S&WB. It’s one of the reasons she said the agency is spending hundreds of thousands more to bring Cogsdale back for additional training.
Some of those who were trained on the software when it was implemented need advanced training to fully utilize it, according to Brown-Russell.
“If you don’t train people going forward you wasted your money,” she said.
Last week, Giarruso and the City Council asked for additional documentation from S&WB on the Cogsdale contract to try and get answers about where the real problem lies.
It’s some of the same information WWL-TV requested via Louisiana’s public records law last November.
The agency released most of the requested documentation Thursday to WWL-TV.
“I'm waiting to receive word from the Sewerage & Water Board that the breakdown was on their side of the house. So, we're waiting to see, when it was implemented, were people not trained as well as they needed to be,” Giarruso said.
Moving forward, he said, it is essential for leaders to ask the right questions to stop the tide of disputed bills.