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.
Liberal
Yasmin Ratansi Liberal Don Valley East, ON
So you would change the mindset of the people who have been there for 30 years, who have been taught that this is what they should do to protect themselves.
Liberal
Yasmin Ratansi Liberal Don Valley East, ON
I did mergers and acquisitions. When you do mergers and acquisitions, you eliminate a lot of people as well. In SSC's mergers and acquisitions, there was a merger of 43 departments.
President, AdaptiveOrg Inc., As an Individual
I don't think they got rid of people, but I don't know exactly what happened. There may have been stuff on the retirement side where they didn't rehire, but I don't know. The structure of the organization isn't conducive to it. If they're going to do a merger, it will take a long time. In six months, I could create some key services with a JTF2 team that would unlock some bottlenecks and allow program delivery.
Conservative
Conservative
Kelly McCauley Conservative Edmonton West, AB
If you can finish quickly, I'd like to hear the end of that.
Liberal
Yasmin Ratansi Liberal Don Valley East, ON
I just wanted to know if he would do the same for Phoenix, because it's the planning process that's the problematic thing.
Conservative
Kelly McCauley Conservative Edmonton West, AB
No, I allowed him to finish that question. Shame on you for taking my time.
President, AdaptiveOrg Inc., As an Individual
Well, Phoenix is a deep hole, but SSC.... Phoenix is difficult because the commitments had been made. It's a messy ball. SSC, however, still has an organization that is effectively keeping the lights on, but they can't create anything new because of the conflict in the structure. So with SSC, I would create a tiger team and I would give them authority, very high-level authority. It would not be the authority to tell them what to do but the authority to clear the path around the goal to be attained. It would be their goal; they would own the goal. The team would have to deliver on the goal. Everybody's accountable. We'd come back every 90 days and ask them how it went. There's an out for everybody from a risk point of view. If we see that the team isn't working, and we need to change some dynamics to make it work, then we do another 90 days and assess whether we're making progress, whether we're creating the value we want. After that, we look at how fast we're creating the value. When we get to that point, we can consider doing some forecasting.
Conservative
Kelly McCauley Conservative Edmonton West, AB
Thanks for finishing that.
I want to get back to RFPs. You talked about giving the suppliers the outcome, and how Cisco has smaller RFPs, whereas ours are 200 pages for a pencil. How would you see RFPs not for ships but for regular items? Currently we pack every little detail in there so that we're not sued for unfairness. We put out our RFP, and tell them we're going to choose the lowest bidder. How would agile look there?
President, AdaptiveOrg Inc., As an Individual
I'm having chats with Vincent Robitaille in modernization and procurement. I think there are procurement vehicles that could be leveraged immediately. There are standing arrangements where I can say, “Look, I just need to get some people who have this skill.” I put them on a team and they're going to go for 90 days. I have another vehicle where I need to buy a few components, or where I need to buy some services. So I can go get those. The procurement process itself is a little heavy. It requires a lot of documentation.
President, AdaptiveOrg Inc., As an Individual
We do a lot of work on visualizing projects. Instead of having a 10-page plans and priorities document, we would have it all on a couple of pages. We call it a canvas, and it's more like a map. It takes the essentials out of plans and priorities. If we did flip charts of the plans and priorities for department A, and we'd have about five flip charts, we'd put them together on a page. Anybody could look at it and know immediately what they're in business for. They'd know what they're doing, why they're doing it, and who they're doing it for. Again, plans and priorities shouldn't get into the “how” of it.
Conservative
Kelly McCauley Conservative Edmonton West, AB
Big capital-intensive projects that you mentioned do not lend themselves well to the agile system for purchasing. What within government do you think would be a good cut-off?
President, AdaptiveOrg Inc., As an Individual
If you're going to buy something like a boat, it's probably more difficult, but Elon Musk is—
Conservative
Kelly McCauley Conservative Edmonton West, AB
The reason I ask is that there's this great story about buying knapsacks for the army. It's taking us longer to procure them than it took us to win the Second World War.
President, AdaptiveOrg Inc., As an Individual
Right. Well, that's the value question. How much does it cost to do something, and what value do you get in return?
It costs me $300 to do something that gives me a $20 value return. On procurement, I have a $25,000 max. Okay: so it goes through a whole process over $25,000, and the process costs $100,000. Why don't we lift the...? Especially now that NAFTA is probably going, we might have a little bit more room.
It's about empowering. You would put a bit more in the departments, but you would have these checks and inspection points much more frequently. The inspection points for sure are every 90 days. We gave you a little bit of money. Then we had an inspection. What did you do? Instead of giving me a big plan that you think might happen, I want you to implement some stuff. We'll see what happens in 90 days. We mitigate risk by keeping it small.
Conservative
Kelly McCauley Conservative Edmonton West, AB
How would agile change our RFP process, though? In even the smallest things, we end up with a 100-page RFP.
