Preserving capacity, General Tom Lawson, Chief of the Defence Staff, Keys to Canadian SAR
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D DefSeC AtlAntic www.vanguardcanada.com octoBer/noVeMBer 2014 37 Procurement strategy If there is any consensus on the federal govern- ment's Defence Procurement Strategy, most agree it is a work in progress. There is plenty of reason to be optimistic, but no one seems too sure how it will evolve. That was certainly the perspective of three panellists at DEFSEC Atlantic, where the strat- egy provided a backdrop to many of the busi- ness-to-business meetings taking place over two days in Halifax. Christopher Baird, the senior director for the Defence Procurement Secretariat at Public Works and Government Services Canada, pro- vided an overview of the DPS and the steps taken so far to introduce its various components, from earlier industry engagement to new governance measures, leveraging strategies around exports and job growth, criteria for value propositions, a new focus on industrial and technological benefits, the release of the Defence Acquisition Guide, and a broader challenge function of re- quirements inside National Defence. Ultimately, Baird said it "represents a funda- mental change in the way the government is go- ing to approach certain aspects of the process." He said discussion are already underway with industry on projects where the government has decided to apply the value proposition. "Some of the projects that are now upcoming are per- fect examples of where DPS can really be applied because discussions will start in the early options analysis phase, right when it becomes a project and there is some time ahead to have fruitful dis- cussions on what technical compliance and cost will look like [and] what the VP needs to be." Baird confirmed that Industry Canada is working on a framework document to be re- leased this fall that will help industry understand the premise and criteria "on which value prop- ositions will be applied," and that an interim board at PWGSC will report in November on the governance structure. Although Derrick Rowe was bullish on the strategy – even calling it a "game changer" and "lifesaver" for small- and medium-sized busi- nesses – the chairman of Bluedrop Performance Learning admitted he was uncertain how it would unfold. But he urged SMEs to get involved in discus- sions around export strategies and ITBs. "If we don't shape that, we're going to suffer," he said. "The scoring of the ITBs is very important to our future." He also said the strategy and the requirement for value propositions could "change the way we do business with OEMS and tier 1 suppliers. I'm hoping this is an opportunity to get innova- tion back into the system. We have seen innova- tion stop. We are having a hard time getting our innovative products into the system because the procurement cycle is so long and by the time they get to the procurement, it's not innova- tive." Despite that optimism, David Perry, the se- nior security and defence analyst with the Con- ference of Defence Associations Institute, in- jected a note of caution. "I think there needs to be some realism in how quickly this can unfold and what exactly it is going to change and how," he said. "[T]the expectation that this is going to fix defence pro- curement is wholly unrealistic. This is not going to be a silver bullet, no matter how it shakes out." Perry urged patience, noting the volume of challenges that currently exist in the procure- ment system – the Defence department's in- ability to spend its full funding allotment for the past five years; project management workforce issues due to cuts in the 1990s and a rapid in- crease in large, complex, multi-million dollar projects; and a fundamental tension between leveraging and improving procurement simul- taneously. Equally challenging, all of the changes out- lined in the strategy will have to be implemented without "stopping all the existing procurements which were launched under different systems." He also noted the number of reform efforts that National Defence has had to process in the past few years, from transformation, to defence renewal and even the introduction of the gov- ernment's Canada First Defence Strategy. "I think Defence is experiencing a certain degree of fatigue at the end of all these processes." a game changer, but no silver bullet