Thank you very much for your question, Mrs. Fortier.
As I said, we have made changes to the policies on all our digital transformation projects. At the Treasury Board, we are making a lot of changes with the help of the Canadian Digital Service. Recently, we attracted the person who has become the first CEO of that organization from the United States. He was the former leader of the United States’ digital services team. He also worked for President Obama and his administration.
We're changing the digital standards. We're bringing in the kinds of digital standards that other governments have brought in within other jurisdictions, common sense standards like having end-to-end user testing, so you actually know whether something works, and maintaining the legacy system until the new system is working well.
One of the standards we're putting in place as a digital principle is testing, with the minister and deputy minister responsible actually having to try the system. So they test it themselves.
Governments typically focus on policy and communications based on the assumption that once you get the policy right and the communications right, things just implement themselves. We know how that works out, not just with Phoenix but on a bunch of government transformations. This is not a partisan thing by the way, because all governments of all stripes struggle with transformation and digital transformation.
We are studying the models and experiences of other governments to put in place changes that will prevent a future Phoenix from happening again, or if it fails, it would fail with a working prototype earlier on. We're doing this because one of the lessons we've learned from other jurisdictions is to break these massive projects into modules and to develop working prototypes in particular departments and agencies, and to test them. If they are successful, they are expanded to other areas, and if they are not, we pull the plug on them and try something else.
Something that has emerged in the last 10 years is agile project management in digital transformations. It's a very different approach. Again, this is not a partisan thing, because governments of all stripes struggle with digital transformation. I believe the changes we're making will raise the bar.