Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Mr. Murphy, I listened to your presentation carefully. I have read about your background, your work experience, and so on. My career was in telecommunications, and I worked in a Canadian company that is well known in the sector and that I will not name. A variety of project management models and standards govern the multiple ways of doing things, such as ISO 9000 and ISO 8000 certifications. Great sayings, such as “if you find yourself in a hole, stop digging”, have emerged. I completely agree with all that.
However, the peculiarity of large projects is that sellers, designers, integrators and promoters of solutions provide options only for the entire project. Few companies, such as Cisco or IBM, are willing to sell only a portion of a program or project. They want to sell global solutions only, even if the projects require funding of $50 million or $1 billion. I'm sure of that. The approach is different if the project management model incorporates ways to bring the projects to completion. Project management is a major undertaking, and there is no quick fix.
So I am wondering about the Agile project management model, which has been around since the 1990s, as I understand it. Quite frankly, in my short career of just around 20 years in telecommunications, I have never heard of Agile. Perhaps I was following another school of thought, or we had to manage other types of projects. However, we managed small projects that were part of larger ones. In a way, the idea is to manage big projects by splitting them—that's not new.
How does Agile differ from other models, apart from being guided by a particular management philosophy that is less focused on note-taking? We understand that the concept of paperless management unfortunately does not exist. Although, in practice, technology has invaded all our activities, paper is still very present. How can we be persuaded to trust this method? How can I be sure that this is not a trial and error process for larger projects, especially given the difference between private companies and the government sector? You briefly touched on the complexity of the projects, but I think there is a huge difference between projects undertaken by various companies and those undertaken by a government, particularly the sizeable Canadian government. Can you clarify that? You may not want to go into too much detail, but can you still explain how this management method is different from another?