MYGCPAY HR-TO-PAY PLATFORM
Enhancing employee pay transparency while reducing service bottlenecks
24 months
stakeholder management, systems design, service design, accessibility
In 2016, rollout of a new federal Canadian payroll system, called Phoenix, triggered a national crisis: pay inaccuracies and prolonged issue backlogs. What began as a technical rollout failure quickly became a trust collapse.
I was onboarded by IBM to design solutions that restored employee confidence. While I contributed across multiple initiatives, this case study focuses on MyGCPay—a centralized, web platform that made pay information interpretable and case resolution more transparent.
I initially led the design of pay-related data (paystub, history) before owning and shipping the entire MyGCPay platform and virtual agent. I collaborated closely with client leadership and technical teams to define short and long term product plans.
When I was onboarded to the project in 2019, government support for employees dealing with the aftermath of Phoenix was well-intentioned, but in practice the path to resolution was opaque.
Employees were left to identify and escalate their own pay issues, navigating multiple portals, policies, documents, and processes.
I spoke to compensation and call centre teams who were overloaded by repeat inquiries from employees, many of which were driven by uncertainty rather than new information.
Our objective was to reduce the high volume calls caused service bottlenecks.
MyGCPay as a rapid MVP that was scaled over two years into a robust self-service platform. Here are the core experiences that was brought to life:
The MyGCPay dashboard gives employees a clear snapshot of their paystub information, tax documents, pay issue tickets, and benefits details, all in one place.
Employees can now stay on top of their pay across overlapping acting positions in one consolidated view. They have access to pay breakdowns and past earnings — something they had to previously track on their own.
The two-step triage of processing pay issues has become more transparent to users. Employees can now follow their inquiry from submission to escalation, seeing exactly when it transitions into an active case.
We designed the chatbot to handle routine questions and guide employees through policies, HR-related forms, or existing tickets with minimal friction. Strategic prompts acted as checkpoints, ensuring employees were handed off to live staff without breaking the flow of the conversation.
MyGCPay would have to operate within a highly constrained ecosystem shaped by policy, legacy infrastructure, and regulations.
We introduced a UI layer over existing systems to unify pay data and guidance into a self-service experience. While it didn't initally address underlying issues, it bought time for engineering teams to build out a backend for the near future.
We designed a bento-style layout that made it easy to introduce newly approved data over time. When conversations turned to a manager solution, I successfully advocated for extending the same layout to create the MyGCPay manager view.
From conversations with different departments, I discovered that staff at call centers, compensation centers, and HR departments had limited cross-visibility but shared pain points.
I co-led an organization-wide workshop that brought departments together for the first time. We realized that pay issues cascaded downstream and different priorities actually pointed to the same recurring pain points. This led to an aha moment!
I developed service blueprints to articulate a future-state vision and align teams around a shared direction. The process built stakeholder ownership and confidence by ensuring their perspectives shaped the roadmap forward.
As teams rotated and delivery evolved, the risk wasn’t the interface — it was losing design intent. We created continuity guidelines capturing logic, accessibility requirements, and edge cases to preserve experience integrity beyond handoff.
A collaborative roadmap aligned managers and compensation advisors, leading to contract extension and anchoring MyGCPay within their operational workflows. These efforts led to continuous partnership down the road.
When MyGCPay rolled out to 330,000 federal employees, it changed the day-to-day experience from guessing to knowing. Its launch contributed to the reduction of pay-related tickets across the public service.
More importantly, it earned genuine user support, echoed in national coverage and social posts!
This was my first time leading design at this scale, where AI and governance had to coexist. I learned to design guardrails, define escalation paths, and ship responsibly.
