Shared Services Canada launches Centre of Expertise in Agile and Innovative Procurement

Shared Services Canada (SSC) recently established a Centre of Expertise in Agile and Innovative Procurement (CoEAIP). The CoEAIP will explore and test agile and innovative procurement practices and share this expertise throughout the federal government.

“We’ve had a small team focussed on procurement modernization since spring 2018,” says Sean Kealey, Director General, Procurement Vendor Relations directorate. “We’ve been busy researching and experimenting and have already had a few successes!”

For example, last year, SSC launched a ‘challenge-based’ procurement vehicle for a small application for Treasury Board Secretariat.

“Rather than providing a detailed list of requirements and a lengthy request for proposal (RFP), this solicitation laid out the problem and invited vendors to propose the solution,” Kealey adds. “The process was designed to award small contracts for prototypes and we awarded the final contract to the winning submission.”

This process reduced the paperwork associated with the bidding process, and opened the door to the market’s innovative energy in a way that should be encouraged more often.

Reducing barriers

Procurement modernization has other benefits that are just as important for the Government of Canada, which has a responsibility to spend taxpayer dollars in ways that stimulate the economy. It must also be inclusive of businesses run or owned by under-represented groups.

Reducing the administrative burdens associated with bidding on government business can reduce the barriers to entry for businesses not big enough to keep a team of RFP specialists on staff.

The Centre of Expertise will focus on three main elements with the objective of having agile procurement become a standard practice across government. It will:

• Be an agile procurement incubator, contracting experts with facilitation skills to support technical clients and procurement officers during the design phase.
• Simplify contract documents and processes and develop and disseminate the tools and guidance required to enable the transformation to agile procurement.
• Develop agile procurement experts to build the government’s agile procurement capacity.

“An important part of the Centre of Expertise – maybe its most important benefit – will be the production of agile procurement experts,” Kealey says “To that end we will be offering opportunities for micro-missions and temporary assignments. Procurement professionals can come and learn about agile procurement at SSC and take this knowledge back to their home departments.”