Management in the Government of Canada: A Commitment to Continuous Improvement

4. Innovative Government

To become more innovative, the Government of Canada will:

• ensure that a professional public service is adaptable, with the competencies, tools, and values needed to achieve excellence in all facets of public administration; and
• gather and share high-quality information in support of decisions to invest and realign expenditures to emerging priorities.

The Challenge

Over several decades, governments in most modern democracies have been challenged to be truly innovative, while maintaining responsible stewardship of public resources. Doing so requires, first and foremost, a public service that can assess spending, challenge inefficient processes, evaluate and report on program performance, and operate transparently. It also requires the good management and strong organizational performance that ultimately depend on people. The government needs to invest in the skills of its current workforce and to recruit talent that reflects the diversity of the public that government serves. The success of the government’s management improvement agenda will rely heavily on the talent and knowledge of public service employees—and on their dedication to serve the public good.

Innovation will also require better expenditure management systems. The typical pattern has been for budgets to grow with every newly identified priority, until a tipping point is reached and radical, often painful reductions in government spending are needed. However, responding to 21st-century issues—public security is a good example—requires sustained commitments that are possible only when government brings long-term stability to its budgets and has the appropriate performance information at hand to determine where investments are delivering results.

Action Plan

Efforts to achieve innovative government are focussed in two areas:

• investing in public service employees; and
• results-driven expenditure management.

Investing in public service employees

Public service employees are at the heart of an innovative government. Through their professionalism, commitment, creativity, and leadership, they will drive the modernization agenda and make it work. To succeed, the government will provide all employees with the training and tools they need to do their jobs and support them with career-long learning and development opportunities. Knowledge and skills will be enhanced at all levels, innovation championed, and good performance rewarded. The government will be an inclusive employer whose workforce reflects Canada’s diversity and respects official language rights. A new generation of public service employees will be recruited who bring with them new ideas and experiences and who challenge established ways of doing things.

To these ends, the government will:

• complete the implementation of the Public Service Modernization Act (PSMA) and ensure it produces sustainable benefits;
• implement a more strategic approach to human resources planning and recruitment to address departmental and government-wide requirements in key priority areas; and
• provide a targeted approach to learning that increases opportunities for public service employees to learn and develop their knowledge, skills, and professionalism throughout their careers.

Completing PSMA implementation

The government will also update its job classification system to align it with marketplace realities, treat work performed by women and men equitably, and facilitate career development and mobility. By early 2009, the government will have a streamlined classification system in place to support faster and more effective staffing. Building on lessons learned from past experience, the government will:

• review classification standards for all occupational groups;
• simplify and clarify its classification policies and guidelines;
• strengthen support for classification specialists through better training and tools; and
• make further improvements to the monitoring of and reporting on the performance and costs of its classification system.

At the same time, the government will continue to support the PSMA components that are already in place, such as the Public Service Labour Relations Act, which came into force on April 1, 2005, to encourage bargaining agents and management to find innovative solutions to human resources (HR) issues and workplace disputes.

Implementing a more strategic approach to HR planning and recruitment

To support the more flexible staffing system resulting from the PSEA and strengthen accountability, the government will link sound HR planning to business planning. By 2006, the government will ensure that all departments and agencies integrate HR and business planning, with the support of more timely and reliable HR research, information, tools, and expertise from central agencies. This will allow for better forecasting of HR needs and better integration of HR requirements in departmental business plans.

Furthermore, to help departments and agencies recruit and develop highly qualified individuals, the government will pursue efficient ways to recruit in common priority areas that serve the government as a whole. This will support a more inclusive public service that will draw talents from all regions across the country. The government will begin to implement this approach in 2007 to complement the increased flexibility provided by PSMA for departments and agencies to recruit the specific skills they need.

Finally, the government will update the manner in which public service employees are compensated. A competitive, equitable, and affordable compensation system is essential if the Public Service is to attract, reward, and retain people with the talent and skills it needs from across the country. The government has initiated a comprehensive review of compensation. Once completed, the government will update its strategic approach to compensation to make it consistent with the increased responsibilities and accountabilities of a more transparent and performance-oriented management regime.

Enriching public service professionalism, competencies, and knowledge through learning and development

A government committed to innovation supports its employees in career-long learning. The government will put in place immediately a new learning framework to foster:

• individual capacities to do the job, to be ready for the next job, and to lead change;
• organizational leadership for transformation inside the Public Service and in all aspects of service to Canadians; and
• innovation to keep the Public Service at the leading edge of public-sector management.

The Public Service needs the right mix of people to get the job done; to this end, the government will begin to recruit and develop staff in priority areas, including chief financial officers, chief audit executives, and procurement, materiel management, and HR specialists.

Against the backdrop of these priorities, the government will focus this new learning investment on the specific needs of three groups of public service employees:

• the new employees, who are the future of the Public Service and who must begin their careers the right way, with a clear understanding of the special role and expectations of public service employees; therefore, starting in 2006, within two months of being hired, new employees will attend an orientation program designed to convey an introduction not only to government, but also to the values and ethics of public service;
• the functional financial, audit, procurement, materiel management, and HR specialists, on whom an effective public service depends so much to achieve the balance of efficient program delivery and compliance and who will have access to specialized training programs to support professional development and certification; and finally
• supervisors at all levels, who bear particular responsibilities for organizational leadership and for important authorities granted to them in financial and HR management and who will receive focussed training and leadership development programs.

To strengthen its capacity in both official languages, the government will also develop and implement an action plan to make language training more effective. In turn, the Public Service Commission of Canada will adopt a new approach to language testing as soon as possible that will incorporate the best practices of second-language assessment. This approach will include a procedure for reviewing cases of multiple failures, better assessing the oral skills of candidates with special difficulties, and incorporating research on best practices in second-language assessment.

As deputy ministers assume new HR management responsibilities under the PSMA, they will implement learning strategies for their organizations. To guide these efforts and ensure that public service learning and development objectives are met, central agencies will establish minimum knowledge standards and learning requirements to provide public service employees with the guidance they need to pursue continuous learning.

Furthermore, the Code of Conduct for the Public Sector and the Charter of Values of Public Service will embody the core values and reflect the professionalism of public service employees. They will set standards for performance and conduct and the government will provide training to ensure that these standards are maintained.

Results-driven expenditure management

Improved expenditure management through better information management

To improve the manner in which it relates spending to results achieved, the government developed the Management, Resources, and Results Structure Policy (MRRS)to require departments and agencies to implement structures that link programs and activities to the high-level strategic outcomes of organizations and document substantial information on resource expenditures and results. All organizations that rely on parliamentary appropriations began implementing MRRS in 2005 and government will accelerate progress in the coming period. These structures will support a government-wide approach to the collection and analysis of information on financial and non-financial results. This, in turn, will help the government better assess value for money, allocate resources, and report on performance.

The government has begun developing the new Expenditure Management Information System (EMIS) to collect the information that the MRRS Policy requires. Over the next two years, this major systems change will automate key elements of expenditure management, including the process that generates the Main Estimates tabled in Parliament. The government will seek ways in which to bring the expenditure plans in the Estimates more in line with those outlined in the budget to better enable parliamentarians to track spending over the budget cycle. They will have a better appreciation of what the government intends to accomplish with new investments and will be able to check back more easily and hold the government to account.

A more strategic approach to expenditure management in horizontal priority areas

The government is developing an approach to expenditure management that will help it better set priorities, plan budgets, and allocate funds to ensure long-term stability. In support of this effort, it is making improvements to its expenditure management system to capture more accurate, consistent, and transparent performance information.

Furthermore, the government has increased its understanding of key horizontal issues, whether program-related or more administrative in nature. In Budget 2005, for example, it committed to review all climate change programs—12 federal organizations are currently delivering approximately 100 initiatives—before allocating new funds to ensure they go where they can do the most good and meet emission reduction targets. It will complete this review against a performance management framework in 2005 and provide recommendations to ministers on the allocation of the new funds starting in 2006. The performance management framework for climate change will also provide the basis on which future reallocation in this area is decided. This will be an important first step in allowing the government to reallocate its resources in relation to its overall objectives on a horizontal policy priority.

The government will also review a number of other priority areas with the same goals in mind: to increase transparency and deliver better results from its investments. These include public security and anti-terrorism programs to inform new security investments and reallocations in 2006; and programming for Aboriginal Canadians to improve socio-economic conditions in Aboriginal communities.

In short, the government is actively engaged in developing and promoting horizontal approaches to management in a way that supports accountability, responsiveness, and innovation. This will involve fundamental transformation of the way government works in areas such as service delivery, internal operations, and management of policies and programs. The creation of Service Canada and the resulting one-stop access to a range of programs and services provides the most visible example of horizontal management of service delivery. Under internal operations, the government intends to move forward with shared service delivery models that will streamline and standardize business processes and information systems to support whole-of-government decision making. Finally, significant progress is being made towards enhancing horizontal management of policies and programs at a systemic and sectoral level. Examples at a systemic level include implementation of the MRRS Policy and the Management Accountability Framework (MAF), which will provide a common government-wide approach to assess value for money, allocate resources, and report on performance. At a sectoral level, the government is evaluating the effectiveness of expenditure management in areas such as climate change and Aboriginal programming to develop common views on shared outcomes and track performance from a horizontal perspective.

As a necessary support to results-driven expenditure management, the government also intends to improve its capacity to evaluate the effectiveness of its programs. To improve value for money, lessons learned from program evaluations must become more directly linked to resource allocation decision making in central agencies and throughout the government. In 2006, the government will strengthen its evaluation policy and demand substantially improved program effectiveness information to support resource allocation and reallocation throughout the program base.

Conclusion

An innovative government is supported by highly qualified and knowledgeable public service employees who are equipped with modern tools, training, and opportunities for continuous learning. It has the right information at its disposal to review its operations, establish priorities, make intelligent investment and reallocation decisions, and deliver results. It pursues standardized processes and common systems to improve productivity. The Public Service is a learning organization dedicated to openness, innovation, responsible risk taking, and performance excellence.