Talent Cloud has been an unusual experiment for government - something often commented on not only by colleagues in the Government of Canada, but also by domestic and international public services who are hoping to develop more support for innovative practices. It’s a grassroots start-up, funded by a patchwork of partner departments with common goals and different HR structures, and it’s focused on multi-year experimentation to address entrenched systemic challenges. As such, Talent Cloud has operated in an environment that is relatively rare. There is no doubt that the work achieved could not have been accomplished so quickly, with such intensity, if it hadn’t been for an agile-enabled operational model that was able to embrace the Digital Standards.
But Talent Cloud’s existence also relied heavily on the serendipity of circumstances and individual champions. It is not, in short, a stable path towards experimentation that we’d recommend to others. While this has afforded many advantages in terms of speed, research and flexibility, there have also been significant challenges, such as the erratic nature of an annually renewed partnership model (small investments from many departments), and the operational challenges of securing a server environment that would fully enable an open source experiment handling sensitive personal information. There have also been numerous places where the iterative nature of an agile build - particularly one that changes regularly based on user input - hasn’t fit comfortably into the standard project approval processes and annual reporting cycles of the Government of Canada.
As we prepare this report, the Talent Cloud experiment, as originally conceived, is concluding. The result of our development efforts over the last three years have led to numerous insights on ways to improve recruitment, and a fully operational staffing platform that has delivered a hiring timeline dramatically faster than the Government of Canada average.
The Talent Cloud project (as it has been) is wrapping up at a time when there are still numerous promising developments well underway. The future of the project remains uncertain. Funding proposals have been submitted to advance several of the project options identified in Section 5 of this report, but as of yet none have been confirmed. The team itself will be shifting to collaborate with those inside the Office of the Chief Information Officer with a mandate to advance the Minister for Digital Government’s priorities on securing and enabling digital talent. The platform work done to date will be an asset, but it will be up to the GC digital community and the Chief Information Officers in various departments to direct the nature of the work from here on out.
Talent Cloud has been a project focused on reimagining the talent engine for government, with a particular focus on attracting those with high demand digital and tech skills. But there’s a wide range of innovation and experimentation initiatives across the Government of Canada that offer similar benefits in terms of approach: test, iterate, improve, then scale. And many are facing similar challenges around finding a way through the system to get started and existing long enough to deliver real benefits.
A project like Talent Cloud poses broader questions for the Government of Canada around whether or not it wants to contain experimental innovation projects such as this, and if so, what steps is it willing to take to resource, enable and support them.
There are some questions to be asked here: Does this type of project have value for the Government of Canada and for Canadians? Does the Government of Canada want to replace large waterfall projects with iterative, responsive projects aimed at continuous improvement and adaptation? Does the Government of Canada want to support a shift towards agile approaches and Digital Standards, including the establishment of internal multidisciplinary product teams?
If the answer to these questions is yes, then the answer to the next question becomes much harder: What concrete actions will the Government of Canada take next to create a stable innovation pipeline that supports experimentation, measures results, and mainstreams agile best practices and Digital Standards into government operations?
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