CSPS Digital Academy/CSPS Digital Accelerator/Team 4 - CSPS

Canada School of Public Service Procurement Portal

Our Team

We are the Canada School of Public Service Digital Accelerator team. Our team includes procurement (Anick Matthieu, Caroline Dupuis, Naomi Gautier, and Sonia Porlier), IT (Blair Kilrea), and client representatives (Melissa Wilson and Blair Kilrea). We have a wide range of expertise and come from multidisciplinary backgrounds. We have the knowledge. We have the experience. We can do this! Our Steering Committee members are Tom Roberts, François Brunet and Pierre Leduc, and they are enabling us to develop the best possible solution for the School.

 

Our Problem  

At the Canada School of Public Service, procurement requests are often done at the last minute, when they have become urgent. Because they are under pressure and rushing, clients often submit poorly developed documentation. To meet the timelines, the procurement team often has to cut corners and produce documents that are only “good enough” to ensure that programs and services continue to be delivered.  

How might we, then, facilitate the procurement process so that clients find it easier to fill out forms, and the procurement team spends less time in back-and-forth with clients and more time on document quality and alignment with policy framework, hence minimizing risks for the School?

This is what our team set out to explore.

 

Journey to Our Solution  

From the start, we had a pretty good idea of what we wanted to achieve. Procurement information, templates and checklists are currently available on the School intranet. However, this content is all static, dry and sometimes hard to decipher or find. We wanted to offer a user-friendly interface that would be easy for clients to use and that would provide valued and complete information to procurement officers.  

With the Digital Accelerator’s coaching and bootcamps, as well as our team’s current and growing competencies, we were able to strengthen our idea through the creation of stakeholder personas and journey mapping. These tools gave us good insights into the design of our portal and the various tools we could use to make the experience richer and transparent.  

 

Our Prototyped Solution

The Canada School of Public Service Procurement Portal is our solution. This one-stop portal streamlines the procurement process and centralizes all the required information based on a client’s level of knowledge. With a few clicks, clients have access to the information they need to accurately complete their procurement request with less effort. The portal includes some pre-filled templates, frequently asked questions, a chatbot, access to coaching and training resources and key documents, such as the procurement policy framework. Clients can also receive personalized advice and services that are customized and tailored to their needs.  

We hope to make life easier for everyone, including clients, stakeholders and us, the procurement team. The end product will be user-friendly and interactive with information, documentation and embedded processes, policies and approvals. What needs to happen now is to take our prototype to the next level by taking an iterative approach. Our goal is to launch the portal this fiscal year and add capabilities as they are developed, while waiting for confirmation of the hosting platform.

Takeaways

The Accelerator not only made us think outside the box, but it also took us right out of our comfort zone and threw us into the ‘digital stratosphere’. The experience was intense and mind-blowing, but we are now equipped with an overflowing digital toolbox and competencies that have made us grow into model 3.0 of public servants.

Some of us were very reluctant to join this program, as we did not have many digital skills. It also seemed unattainable to have a prototype completed in such a small amount of time. However, the experience was very positive, as we have learned a lot when it came to coding, data, human-centred design, personas, and journey and empathy maps. We enjoyed working as a team and were all equally invested in creating the best possible prototype for our department, in a very short amount of time and with very limited resources. We have had a lot of fun throughout this whole process. We’re a positive group with great ideas. It’s going to be really nice to see it all come together in the end!