Proceedings of the Standing Committee on
Internal Economy, Budgets and Administration
Issue 5 - Evidence - February 5, 2015
OTTAWA, Thursday, February 5, 2015
The Standing Committee on Internal Economy, Budgets and Administration met this day at 8:30 a.m., in public, for the consideration of administrative matters; and in camera for the consideration of administrative and other matters.
Senator Pierre Claude Nolin (Chair) in the chair.
[English]
The Chair: Good morning colleagues. We have a long agenda, so I think it would be appropriate if we start right away. We'll go through the public portion of our meeting, and then we'll move to the in camera portion.
Item No. 1 is the adoption of the minutes of the proceedings of December 11, 2014. I'm convinced everyone has looked at it. Does anyone have a concern or question?
Senator Lang: I'm just not clear what happened with the IPU. Is there a further update on that? Are we proceeding with the IPU allocation? Is that the final decision?
The Chair: We are. We will also have a thorough review of all the financial involvement of the Senate within international and interparliamentary affairs through the process that Senator Wells is doing in the overall review of all the missions and the funding of all those missions. The answer is yes, we proceed, and we also go through a thorough review.
Senator Tkachuk: On that, we met as the JIC yesterday. The way the IPU will proceed is that it's almost like a letter of credit from the two, from the Senate and the House of Commons. We operate within our budget. IPU will get their $550,000, and the two administrations will have to find the money to fund it.
The Chair: Ms. Proulx, do we have the money to fund it?
Nicole Proulx, Director, Finance and Procurement, Senate of Canada: Yes, that has been taken into consideration.
The Chair: Are there any other comments or questions on the minutes of the proceedings of December 11? Do I have a mover?
Senator Lang: So moved.
The Chair: Adopted.
Item No. 2 is the update on the office portal. Welcome to the committee, and the floor is yours. Maybe you should begin by presenting yourself and then presenting your project. Good morning.
Miranda Edwards, Policy, Planning and Corporate Reporting, Finance and Procurement Directorate, Senate of Canada: Good morning. My name is Miranda Edwards. I was the project coordinator for the office portal website.
Ronald Prud'homme, Senior Advisor, Projects and Performance Management, Information Services Directorate, Senate of Canada: My name is Ron Prud'homme. I was the project manager for this project.
The Chair: Do you have a presentation?
Ms. Edwards: This morning we're just going to give you some background about the project, tell you basically what the office portal is and then some next steps for what we would like to do with the future of the website.
To give you a bit of background first of all, this project started because we had a lot of informal feedback from senators and senators' staff that there is a lot of information to know in terms of office management of a senator's office. There are a lot of policies, forms, procedures and best practices. It's not necessarily an intuitive organization, particularly if you come into a senator's office without office management or financial management background. It's not always easy to find the information you need on our existing Internet, and it's not necessarily always easy to find the right person in the large Senate administration to know who has the expertise to help you with your question. All of these can add extra time to basic office management tasks.
The purpose of the office portal is to simplify and streamline office management of the senators' offices generally. The project was put together by Nicole Proulx, Director of Finance; and Darshan Singh, Director of Human Resources. They put together a working group with representatives from each of the directorates throughout the administration with different subject matter expertise to look at ways that we could simplify and streamline office management practices for senators' offices.
We came up with a very early prototype of the office portal design. You have an image of the home page in your agenda that shows you the basic layout. We got permission from this committee to hold consultation sessions with senators' staff. We did that. Once we had an early prototype last summer, we put out the invitation to senators' staff to come to town hall style consultation sessions where we would discuss our ideas.
The response from senators' staff was tremendous. Not only did the consultation sessions that we offered fill up quickly, but on their own initiative staff actually organized more consultation sessions so that more people would have an opportunity to come and participate in this discussion. We showed them an early prototype. We gave them a questionnaire to send back to us. There was a lot of enthusiasm for the project. They liked the idea.
The important thing about the office portal is that it is organized according to office management tasks, not by directorate. Currently, when we provide information in the IntraSen, it's a silo approach where each directorate provides their policies, forms and procedures. As we know, for managing an office, it's very cross-directorate based. For one task such as hiring staff or submitting expense claims, you may need to go to multiple directorates. For example, purchasing IT equipment for your office, you'd need to go to ISD, Finance and Procurement. We wanted to take all the information related to one task and put it in one spot in a step-by-step procedure that shows the best practice for completing that task.
After the consultation sessions, we took a lot of feedback from senators' staff and retooled the design. They had a lot of great suggestions for features to add, like a "what's new" section where we would have administrative updates or bulletins when there is a change in procedure or change in contact person. We had a dedicated office portal email address, office.portal@sen.parl.gc.ca, where staff can write in with questions. If they're having trouble finding a certain policy or they don't know who to contact, they can write and they'll get a response within 24 hours.
We also put in quick links to certain contacts. We put in quick links to common online tools that senators' staff use, like the FRMS budget management tool, the e-claims portal, the e-recruitment portal. Now you just have to go to the office portal home page, the one spot, and get everything you need.
The consultation sessions continued. We tried to make it a very collaborative process. Last fall, we actually had six senators' staff members join our working group so we are now really are a cross-Senate working group. We meet on a bi-weekly basis. We are always taking in feedback from senators' staff. We want this to be a living dynamic resource where it is always evolving and being updated based on user feedback.
Mr. Prud'homme: Maybe as a bit more on the project management side, it's important to note that all senators' staff participants were volunteers, so that helped a lot. They were keen on getting this project alive. We did meet our deadline of launching the site on January 21, a couple of weeks ago.
Another important note is that all the resources used for this project were internal to the Senate so we didn't have to go outside to purchase services or tools to help us. Everything was done internally.
A few next steps are that there are going be more consultation sessions with the senators' staff this summer at their request. So we want to make sure, as Miranda mentioned, that this is kept up to date, that it's managed and that all of the information is pertinent to the task they need to do on a day-to-day basis.
The Chair: Mr. Singh do you have something to add?
Darshan Singh, Director, Human Resources, Senate of Canada: No.
The Chair: Is there any question or comment?
Senator Marshall: Miranda, do you have to be in the parliamentary precinct to access the portal? Can I access that from home?
Ms. Edwards: You have to have access to IntraSen, so, if you have access to IntraSen through your remote access, you can get into it.
Senator Marshall: Is the portal up and running now?
Ms. Edwards: It is, yes.
Senator Marshall: Does that mean that other parts of the Senate website are going to be amended, items removed from other parts because they are now in the portal?
Ms. Edwards: The portal has new content. While each directorate was providing information before, what we've never done is combine that into one guide. So now, for example, for hiring staff, instead of going to all of the different guides, you have it in one place. It's new content in that respect.
In terms of taking information off of directorates' websites, we're not planning to do that yet because there is still a need for each directorate to have their own place on IntraSen.
Mr. Singh: Just on that point, Senator Marshall, one of the key principles with the portal is that at no point will the portal supersede any of the policies. So the policies will always be on IntraSen, and all of the information that people are used to seeing will still remain there. The portal is simply a tool for office staff to use in their day-to-day tasks.
Senator Marshall: Thank you.
Senator Wells: Thank you, Miranda, Ronald and Darshan, for your presentations.
You mentioned that there was input from senators' staff. Do you have an idea of what percentage of senators' offices has utilized this yet? Is there a plan, not so much to give training because it seems to be a very straightforward utility; is there a program to make it widely known to all senators' staff?
Ms. Edwards: There is, actually. We do have a subcommittee of our working group that is responsible for that outreach of the portal. On the first step of the launch, January 21, we sent out an email from this committee to announce that it was live. What we're planning for the break week is that the senators' staff volunteers who are on our working group are going to go around to each office in the Senate and talk with staff, ask if they've used it, talk to them about it, answer questions if they have them. That was actually the idea of the senators' staff. They wanted to go around to each office and promote it. That's on their initiative. We will also have a handout when they do those office visits. It's a list of all of the main reception numbers for key contacts in the Senate and their business hours, as well as a link to the Office Portal. So senators' staff can keep it at their desks, and hopefully it will remind them to use this resource and also give them a great tool because it has all of the phone numbers right there.
As I said, we're going to keep adding content to it over time. We hope that it will be a living resource and will grow. After a period of about a month and a half after the launch, when we've added some new content, we will send out another email to list all of the resources we have on the site and encourage people to go there. As Ron said, at the request of senators' staff, they want more consultation sessions this summer. I think that will be a good opportunity to revisit the site, see if it's working. You really need to give people an extended period of time to get into the habit of using it to see if it works properly the way we want it to.
Mr. Prud'homme: Maybe just to add, we are keeping some performance metrics on the pages visited and, so far, in the last week or so, we have had over 600 pages visited from this portal. So that says a lot. It's being used. It's being consulted. I think it's just going to grow from there.
Ms. Edwards: We had 82 per cent of senators' offices give direct feedback as to what they want in this portal. So I think that, even before the launch, this project was widely known, and there was a sense of ownership over it. I think that will help as well with our outreach.
The Chair: Any other comments or questions? This item was for information, so there is no decision to be taken. Thank you very much for your presentations.
Before we move to the in camera portion of the meeting, I want to remind our listeners that, under rule 12-16 of the Rules of the Senate, when we're discussing remuneration, contracts and labour relations, we go in camera.
In the in camera portion, there will also be an update on the situation of the bollards at the entrance on Wellington Street, and there will definitely be some questions on security matters. So we will all discuss that in camera. The last thing on the in camera portion is that I recommend that the attendance of the in camera portion be for senators, of course, and also for the senior staff of the Senate and, if the senior staff recommend that directors attend that portion of the meeting, they will, on invitation, be part of it. Also, I recommend that political staff of the senators who are working on the steering committee also attend this portion of the meeting. I'm trying to restrict the attendance of the meeting because we have a discretion problem. We are trying to limit attendance to ensure discretion.
Senator Tkachuk: Do political staff go to steering committee meetings?
The Chair: If they are invited, they come. My assistant comes. The reason for that is that most of the discussion leading to the steering committee is between the senior staff of the administration and the senior staff of Senator Furey, my staff and Senator L. Smith's staff.
I'm suggesting that we move to an in camera portion of the meeting. Is it agreed?
Hon. Senators: Agreed.
(The committee continued in camera.)