Thank you for that question.
This audit, in fact, was something different even for us. It's not typical that we engage ourselves early on in procurement initiatives, but we felt that it was important to do given that the Next Generation and benefit modernization projects were critical to services for Canadians going forward. We wanted to ensure that departments had built and learned from the lessons from the Phoenix pay system audit.
That's exactly what we saw. They started to build on those lessons learned. They took steps towards trying a different way to go about procurement that involves better engagement with third party vendors to help design out the technical aspects of a system to meet business needs.
In those two IT solutions we looked at, we saw that better engagement with the suppliers. We also saw a consistent engagement with end-users.
What they could build on and improve now is not losing sight of that end-user focus. Now it's about focusing in on governance and making sure that a clear governance mechanism is there, that there's good oversight and continued follow-up. Then build on training.
Training is key for agile procurements because it requires a different set of competencies and skills than traditional procurement. For example, one of the things we noted was that better answers to questions actually help inform the vendor in a clear way so that they can help submit a proposal that might actually meet business needs.
There are many little things that need to be built on, but I would highlight those as the two biggest ones.