Preserving capacity, General Tom Lawson, Chief of the Defence Staff, Keys to Canadian SAR
Issue link: http://vanguardcanada.uberflip.com/i/337874
M MARITIME www.vanguardcanada.com JUNE/JULY 2014 13 appointment on a Sunday or at night, and that's a non-traditional approach. We've got the same kind of opportunities: how are we making use of the capacity in our schoolhouses, in our mainte- nance facilities? At some point those will result in doing things more efficiently, but the focus right now is producing a better output with inputs that we have available. Q In the plan, you advocate for an enterprise model. Do you have the necessary metrics at this point to fully capitalize on that? We are in the early stages. We're breaking a few eggs here and that's OK; we've got great support inside the broader enterprise. One of the challenges is, we want to make sure that whatever we are doing is nested not only within the broader initiatives of de- fence renewal writ large, but that the mechanisms, tools and pro- cesses we develop are completely compatible. There is no point in us building a perfect mouse trap to run our little part of the business, only to find our mouse trap can't talk to anybody else's mouse trap. So we are being asked in a couple of areas to be a bit of a "beta tester" of how we are going to do things. Like a lot of large organizations, we are swimming in data. The challenge is how you extract information out of that data so you are actually measuring the right things. Ultimately, it is about us- ing that information to make the right decisions. That is one of the conversations the Naval Board is having. But we are transi- tioning from having the ability to mine and collate the data to turning it into information. We are actually starting to shape a lot of what we are looking at, and tying it to initiatives that are going on in the broader departmental sense. Q You are also seeking to deliver a Corporate Capability Risk Matrix. Is that in part about better understanding your data? Partly. It is also about our ability to actually assess risk to make smarter decisions. There is operational risk, which we understand Q In the plan you define an organizing concept of "One Navy." Are there specific drivers that prompted you to frame it this way? The biggest driver is culture. The great strength of the navy is its people, and people are what ultimately define your culture, and your culture defines how your people behave. The notion of one navy was to get us away from where we were, where you had an East Coast approach to things, a West Coast approach, a Reserve approach, and then the headquarters in Ottawa approach. You had four different organizations, all under the flag of the navy, arguing over the stuff that was in the margins of where we needed to go – if you had 80 percent agreement, you were arguing over the 20 per- cent in the margins. That was a real distraction and it was causing an awful lot of the attention and energy of the senior leadership to deal with these unnecessary frictions. The idea of One Navy was to say, we're all on the same team, let's focus on this. The biggest thing to really shake things up was to make people responsible for things that were outside their traditional geo- graphic or organizational responsibilities. For example, all the in- dividual training will be managed and executed by the commander of Maritime Forces Pacific, irrespective of where the schoolhouses are; and all of the collective and operational training elements of force generation, as well as force employment elements of opera- tional planning, fleet readiness and warfare policy will be managed by the commander of Maritime Forces Atlantic. That may not sound like a particularly innovative approach to things, but it's a pretty good example of how you can start to break down some cultural barriers. That is driven in part by the need to align things under single accountabilities for efficiency purposes, but we are also doing it do drive the cultural and behavioural change associ- ated with the fact that we are one navy. If you are a tradesman, a hull tech, serving on the west coast, does it really matter who is running your training? No. But it matters that everything is the same. We've tried to insulate the frontend of the business from all of the churn that is going on at the backend. The folks in the middle? Well, there are a lot of moving parts and they are carry- ing a lot of the burden. But we are making really good progress. Q This is being done in the context of Navy Renewal, which is itself part of a larger transformation effort. Since much of the low hanging fruit has likely all ready been picked with respect to more efficient business process, what are you looking for? We are looking for more objective measures of innovation, ef- ficiency and improvement. This is all about being smarter, faster and more agile. Yes, we are looking for efficiencies in the tradi- tional sense of efficiencies. The simple way to measure that is dol- lars or people, and those currencies are important. But there are other ways: how many times does someone have to be involved in something for it to happen? Using our simulators more fre- quently. I use the analogy of hospitals being smarter about their imaging, running their imaging systems so you can now get an Writing a narrative that resonates