Manitoba Public Insurance has given several reasons to explain both its delay in providing online Autopac services and huge cost overruns to do so. Foremost among these is its hired consultants’ incomplete advice, though the corporation admitted it may have been a bit unrealistic about its goals when it first took on the project.
Chief executive officer Eric Herbelin recently took questions about MPI’s Project Nova, which would see auto insurance services move online over what was originally conceived as a three-year timeline costing $86 million. It projected that online consumer Autopac services would be up and running by April 2023.
In a government committee meeting on the Crown corporation’s 2021 to 2022 annual report, MPI amended its forecast as the price tag on Project Nova stepped closer to $290 million and the timeline stretched to the fiscal year for 2025 to 2026.
“MPI never had the chance to tackle such [a] large project and was not ready to deliver at the pace needed,” Herbelin said. “The initial plan was not realistic and not reasonable for a number of reasons.”
Sharing MPI’s responsibility for the lack of foresight were external consultants hired to help with the online rollout, and who Herbelin said had left out expenses, failed to capture the scale of the project, and “probably missed a few points or were not asked the right questions to [provide] the full scope” when they prepared the initial business plan for Project Nova.
Herbelin also said that these consultants had overestimated its ability to move its services and tech online under the proposed timeline, prompting internal and external reviews that ultimately led to the extended timeline and additional costs it then disclosed to the government committee.
Implementation of Project Nova began two years ago, the Free Press reported.
Herbelin assured committee members that $290 million – while hundreds of millions of dollars over its first conservative estimated cost of $86 million – was not far from projects carried out by similarly-situated corporations.
Herbelin also maintained that MPI would be ready to roll out Project Nova’s initial phases by August 2023, although these phases would focus on commercial customers.
As for ordinary Autopac services such as individual vehicle registrations and claims, MPI said it planned to undertake a ‘discovery process’ starting January 2023 to roll them out with due regard for security risks. Herbelin refused to provide an estimated release date, saying there were still too many unknown factors moving forward, so individual Autopac customers shouldn’t expect to see their license renewals moved online any time soon.
For Tory MLA Kelvin Goertzen – the minister responsible for Manitoba Public Insurance – the variance between Project Nova’s projected and actual costs was concerning, but not surprising. “When it comes to technology projects that are this big, almost always … we find out that it’s more than one might have thought at the beginning,” he told the Free Press right after the committee meeting on Monday.
Manitoba Public Insurance has also been studying a possible switch to a primary driver model after losing a court battle at the Public Utilities Board, shifting away from its current registered-owner model.
