Thank you for the question.
Yes, this is actually one of the areas that our office tries to promote. While we're quite diligent in trying to uncover issues, where there are issues, and try to correct them, the other aspect of what we do is to identify best practices and try to disseminate those best practices in hopes that other government departments pick up on them.
There are three main areas I'd like to talk about. The first one is one I mentioned in the annual report. We're finding that in some departments program managers are involving the procurement community at the front end of the decision-making process. So when there's a decision to launch a new program or build a particular building, having the procurement folks at the table is very important. They need to understand the rationale for the requirements. They need to understand how things are working.
What we found on the other end of the spectrum--we'd been told this by procurement officials, and this is the poor practice--is that they're called in when the decisions are made and they're having to scramble. That's when we know, and we've seen, the corners get cut, because the program manager is under extreme pressure to deliver, the person hasn't accommodated the time that is required to do procurement, and mistakes wind up being made.
So I believe one of the best practices that we've seen is to involve the procurement officials at the front end of the program development process.
The second area is a due diligence initiative. The departments we go into where procurement is working fairly well have robust functioning procurement review committees. So any of the procurement that the department is undertaking in any given month--and most of these committees meet monthly, if not quarterly--are reviewed by the procurement committee. This is something my predecessor mentioned in a couple of reports, and it's something that I believe is a very good practice.