Government Operations committee  Good afternoon, Madam Chair. Thank you for inviting us to appear before your committee to discuss the Treasury Board Secretariat’s role in providing guidance and oversight to institutions on the management of large IT projects. Allow me to introduce myself. My name is Corinne C

Government Operations committee  Thank you, Madam Chair. There are two questions: what has changed, and what are we doing differently going forward? First, in terms of what has changed, Secure Channel was originally conceived as a project going back to roughly 1999-2000. Nine years later, 2009, many things hav

Government Operations committee  Certainly. We are working very hard to avoid, if not eliminate, being in such situations.

Government Operations committee  We don't want projects that are larger than necessary. For a number of reasons, some projects are large. The key is to know when a project can be broken up into phases that generate profit. There are sometimes more opportunities to do that in one program than in others.

Government Operations committee  An initial project is the pilot project. If a new and unproved approach is being tested, before committing the government to a major investment, clearly, in some approaches, particularly for information technologies, the technology and the products change month by month, if not d

Government Operations committee  No, excuse me, I expressed myself badly. We have a template, tools that now lay out the suggested, recommended way of preparing business cases. Yes, the new policy includes those tools, and they have been created and are available.

Government Operations committee  Since the project started, in 1999 or 2000, these are pretty up to date figures that reflect the cost of development, the prototype phase that took place right at the beginning, and the costs of using the service from 2004 to the end of 2009.

Government Operations committee  In the history of Secure Channel, the Voie de communication protégée, business cases have been prepared. In her comments, the Auditor General says that they were not exhaustive enough. The purpose of the new policy is to strengthen current and future analyses. Certainly the direc

Government Operations committee  I don't think, I know that for the use of the existing service we have the costs of the existing services as they have been used since 2006, absolutely. We know how the money is allocated among the departments and agencies, and the support they are given.

Government Operations committee  Madam Chair, that's an excellent suggestion. Yes, we have a template and we'd be more than happy to submit it. Absolutely.

Government Operations committee  We are aware of the size of the investments, but a distinction also has to be made between the start-up costs and regular operating costs. At present we have this service and we are constantly working to reduce costs and find better solutions.

Government Operations committee  Madam Chair, the question is what measures have been taken by Treasury Board to ensure sound management of projects and ensure better returns...

Government Operations committee  As I said, our strategy consists mainly of this: we have improved or updated our project management policy so that it better reflects what are called best management practices for project management. This is based on various strategies, including preliminary studies, but mainly o

Government Operations committee  Absolutely. For the independent review program, there was an important project in the waste water management program. I am going to let Ms. Wutti explain that case, because she is very familiar with it.

Government Operations committee  For example, when a department presents a submission to Treasury Board, in particular to get approval for a project that exceeds the limit allocated to its authorities, we can review the submission, and if we think the project involves somewhat higher-risk elements, we can decide