Evidence of meeting #100 for Government Operations and Estimates in the 42nd Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was agile.
A recording is available from Parliament.
12:20 p.m.
Conservative
12:20 p.m.
President, AdaptiveOrg Inc., As an Individual
Yes, they have a whole-of-government approach.
12:20 p.m.
Conservative
Kelly McCauley Conservative Edmonton West, AB
Whether in procurement or DND, or tiny little bits in every department—
12:20 p.m.
President, AdaptiveOrg Inc., As an Individual
Yes, it's driven out of their Treasury Board equivalent. Basically it has a new project management approach, which has gates around completing agile milestones instead of “We have our requirements document complete.” It's good in that way, but I don't see it from an organizational point of view as much.
What I would recommend in government is that they try an organizational pathfinder project where we start trying to move an organization toward this type of approach, like a Treasury Board. Policy is great, but policy is subservient to what your outcome is. It's supposed to deliver that, and then underneath are directives. The directives, I feel, are just too prescriptive. It takes a long time to create directives, and a lot of work and a lot of people. There is a whole bunch of money savings on the time we take to go into detail about how exactly you're going to do something, when in the end we find out we really didn't know anyway. When it comes to the implementation, the moment of truth, it doesn't pan out.
12:25 p.m.
Conservative
Kelly McCauley Conservative Edmonton West, AB
I'm wondering what the RFP would look like that we would publish to hire agile—
12:25 p.m.
President, AdaptiveOrg Inc., As an Individual
The U.S. government has an organization called 18F, because that's their address on some street in Washington, and they're a bunch of kids out of Google. They have template RFPs and everything that.... The leverage is small. There's stuff out there, and we can leverage a lot of that. The important thing is that you have to jump in, you have to get your hands dirty and start doing this stuff, but don't bet the farm.
12:25 p.m.
Conservative
Kelly McCauley Conservative Edmonton West, AB
What other large private corporations in Canada are using this? Obviously Cisco is.
12:25 p.m.
President, AdaptiveOrg Inc., As an Individual
Shopify is. They have 2,500 teams. I had the Shopify guys come in—phenomenal story—and they're getting a lot done. If you go to Shopify, you'll be the only guy with a jacket and tie on.
12:25 p.m.
Voices
Oh, oh!
12:25 p.m.
Conservative
Kelly McCauley Conservative Edmonton West, AB
Are there any other institutional organizations that you're aware of?
12:25 p.m.
President, AdaptiveOrg Inc., As an Individual
Scotiabank has a huge program. They split off a piece of Scotiabank that doesn't follow the same governance as the bank. They call it their Digital Factory. The reason was that they were getting competition from Tangerine. I think they ended up buying Tangerine, but these online banking things were a big scare for them. So was Bitcoin. That was a huge scare for them. Bitcoin is a point-to-point “we do the transaction, I don't need the bank” company. The stuff is coming so fast, it's extremely difficult to keep up with it. The banks are all moving....
The VP at Scotiabank is coming to the Shaw Centre tomorrow to talk, not about agile per se but about why they split off and did separate governance. We basically said to him, look, we don't want you to come and talk about agile, we want you to talk about why you have a separate governance for this and why you couldn't operate this within the bank.
12:25 p.m.
Conservative
12:25 p.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Tom Lukiwski
Thank you very much.
Mr. Murphy, on behalf of all my colleagues, thank you very much. I found it fascinating and extremely informative. I wish you the best of success. I know that governments are governments and they do what they do. Time will tell exactly how successful this government, or future governments, may be in adopting the type of culture you're speaking of. You certainly opened my eyes, and I think the eyes of a lot of us around here, that perhaps we have to start thinking in a different manner if we want to get the results that you're suggesting are out there.
Again, thank you so very much.
Colleagues, we'll suspend for a couple of moments and we'll go in camera immediately after that.
[Proceedings continue in camera]