May 13, 2025
Subject: REMS Review Findings and Path Forward: Update from the CEO
Let me start by thanking everyone for your part and particularly, your effort and commitment, to making the 2024/25 swimming season a success in Canada. This past year included some additional challenges stemming from a large change which impacted many, if not all, members of our Swimming Canada community, a new registration and meet management system, REMS. We knew there would be bumps with the new system, but the challenges ended up being tougher than we expected and everyone rolled up their sleeves so thank you!
There have been many lessons learned but beyond that we needed to take a step back and really assess whether this past season was a rocky start to REMS or more. To that end, we have recently concluded an evaluation of REMS. This independent and systematic assessment of the system, conducted by Differly, included looking at adoption challenges stemming from people, process or platform, as well as, providing actionable recommendations, options analysis and a roadmap for Swimming Canada into next season and beyond.
Over the three months, the Differly team met with key partners across Swimming Canada including the PSOs, CSCA, the REMS project manager and change manager, as well as with SportLoMo, the REMS software vendor to develop a deeper understanding of barriers and root causes. Differly also conducted a thorough requirements and capabilities assessment of REMS to determine if the platform meets our needs and drives the intended outcomes at Swimming Canada. These findings drove a detailed gaps and opportunities and platform suitability assessment leading to an options analysis and roadmap for Swimming Canada.
While there were no surprises, there were indeed some eye opening and thought provoking findings and recommendations from this evaluation. Here are a few key takeaways:
- Across Swimming Canada, from our PSOs to our clubs, we work very differently. There is a cost when you try to accommodate that much variation and this is beyond just a technology cost, it had a huge cost on our community making it take a lot more time and effort for us, our members, and clubs to complete important tasks like, registration.
- Gaps in our testing and rollout process also made it difficult for our community as it impacted the quality of REMS and your ability to be prepared and ready to support your organization and your respective swimming communities.
- Technology fit requires specificity in requirements and a willingness to adapt how we work. Our requirements lacked detail and specificity and we underestimated the impact of adapting the technology vs. adapting how we work, the combination of which resulted in a system that without change, will be challenged to meet our needs.
As we look forward, we have two big rocks that will need us to work together to shift. The first is facilitating a successful 2025/26 season where the system supports us more than we have to support it and the other, admittedly an even larger rock, is to look at how we work together – how we can align and optimize how we work so that the technology we use going forward can not only support but enhance what we do at Swimming Canada and within swimming in Canada.
Again, thank you for all of your work this past season and please, let’s not just continue but improve how we work together to make registration and event management, and all we do, successful for our swimming communities.
Warmest regards,
Suzanne Paulins
CEO
Swimming Canada