Canadian Government Executive - Volume 22 - Issue 7

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Concurrent Presentations
Sessions
In addition to the insightful keynote pre-
sentations offered during this year’s sym-
posium, many concurrent session presen-
tations were delivered by members from
the PPX community. During these thought-
provoking sessions, presenters focused on
a wide-variety of work being undertaken
within their respective areas, while they
generously shared their lessons learned
and promising practices with symposium
participants.
Presenters for these sessions included se-
nior officials and staff from Veterans Affairs
Canada, Canada Border Services Agency,
Health Canada, Canada Economic Devel-
opment for Quebec Regions, Canadian
Institutes of Health Research, Canadian In-
ternet Registration Authority, and the Social
Sciences and Humanities Research Council
of Canada. Also included were senior con-
sultants from Interis I BDO, Goss Gilroy Inc.,
and BMB Consulting.
Since its inception, PPX has become in-
creasingly engaged with the university
community, sponsoring and supporting
graduate student research in planning and
performance. As part of this collaboration,
the 2016 Symposium included student pre-
sentations and poster sessions on innova-
tive and cutting edge research, to connect
with practitioners in the PPX community.
Walter Zubrycky is owner of Facilitated
Performance Solutions walter.zubrycky@
Katie E. Brown works as an
Internal Audit Manager at the Office of the
Superintendent of Financial Institutions.
PPX’s Annual Symposium was held May
17–19, 2016 in Ottawa, with the theme “Plan-
ning and Performance: Learning from the
Past, Preparing for the Future”. This year’s
Symposium saw a record 233 participants
in attendance, and was particularly special
as PPX celebrated its 20th anniversary.
In keeping with the “Preparing for the
Future” portion of this year’s symposium
theme, the opening keynote presentation
featured Brian Pagan, Assistant Secretary,
Expenditure Management of the Treasury
Board of Canada Secretariat (TBS), who
outlined the strategy being taken to re-
tool the government’s approach to results,
measuring them and communicating their
achievement to Canadians.
The lunch keynote continued on this
theme with a highly engaging panel dis-
cussion on the topic of “The Future of Per-
formance Measurement and Evaluation in
the Government of Canada”. The panel
included former TBS senior executives Mi-
chael Joyce and Lee McCormack, and Tolga
Yalkin, the newly appointed Acting Execu-
tive Director, Program Performance and
Evaluation Division, Expenditure Manage-
ment of TBS. The TBS overall approach to
results management and its new proposed
Policy on Results were discussed along
with lessons learned from past TBS initia-
tives which could be applied to strengthen
these policy developments.
The final keynote presentation of day one
featured Max Moullin, Director of the Public
Sector Scorecard Research Centre and vis-
Many of the presentations referred to
in this article can be accessed through
The Exchange on the PPX website
by registering
as a PPX member. Registration is free.
Members can also join the PPX
Discussion Forum group on LinkedIn and
check out the latest in thoughts, events
and news on planning and performance
in the public sector.
iting fellow at Sheffield Business School in
the UK. This interactive discussion covered
the Public Sector Scorecard, an outcome-
focused performance management frame-
work for the public and non-profit sectors in
the UK. This framework emphasizes building
a culture of innovation, improvement and
change and discourages a top-down blame
culture. During the talk, UK case studies
highlighting the improvement and monitor-
ing of performance across organizational
boundaries were also presented.
As the opening keynote presenter for
day two, Paule Labbé, Executive Director,
Priorities and Planning of TBS presented
the government-wide results of the 2015-
16 Management Accountability Framework
(MAF) process. In addition, the discussion
covered the MAF’s role in testing and refin-
ing government-wide performance mea-
sures for internal services and monitoring
the implementation of various Treasury
Board policies.
Day two’s lunchtime keynote presenter
was Michael Allen, President and Chief Ex-
ecutive Officer of the United Way Ottawa.
Mr. Allen spoke at the 2012 PPX Symposium
about “The New United Way”, highlighting
how its focus on results drives investments
that create a measurably better community
for all. Four years later, in his presentation
entitled “Speaking to the Mind, Nourishing
the Soul: How Data and Storytelling Work
Hand-In-Hand to Create Lasting Change”,
Mr. Allen gave an update on how today
his organization is leveraging data-driven
analysis to fuel its purpose, better connect
with donors and change lives in Ottawa.
The closing keynote address was pre-
sented by Douglas W. Hubbard, President,
Hubbard Decision Research. Douglas is the
inventor of Applied Information Economics
(AIE) and author of the business best-sell-
er “How to Measure Anything: Finding the
Value of Intangibles in Business”. AIE is a
rigorous, quantitative approach to improv-
ing how and what we measure and how
we make the big, risky decisions that use
those measurements. In his presentation,
Mr. Hubbard described how it is possible to
measure any “intangible” and responded
to questions submitted by participants on
particular challenges they had in measur-
ing the “un-measureable”.
September 2016 // Canadian Government Executive / 23
The Performance and Planning
Exchange (PPX) 2016 Symposium
Learning from the Past – Preparing for the Future
Walter
Zubrycky
Katie E.
Brown