Government of New Brunswick

New Brunswick is the largest of Canada’s three Maritime Provinces and is located under Quebec’s Gaspé Peninsula and beside the State of Maine. New Brunswick has eight major cities; its capital is Fredericton where the provincial government is seated. The Government of New Brunswick (GNB) prides itself in being able to offer high uniform standards of social services to all its residents.

In March 2008, GNB mandated the creation of a shared services delivery model that would allow government to respond to increasing demographic challenges, improve management of internal resources, streamline process and procedures, and realize savings from resulting efficiencies.

A small group of GNB employees were hired to form the nucleus of the Internal Services Alignment team (ISA). This group was tasked with creating and operationalizing a shared services delivery organization.

In June of 2009, Chazey Partners was contracted to provide ISA with three specific deliverables:

• Midterm assessment of ISA progress and approach;
• Development of preliminary business cases for Procure to Pay, Hire to Retire, and IT Services Desk; and
• Development of a robust, aggressive and achievable project plan that included design, build and deployment phases.

Following the successful outcome and achievement of all deliverables, Chazey was hired for a second, longer term contract with ISA in the autumn of 2009 to assess “as is” process in over 25 departments and central agencies; develop “to be” process for the newly formed New Brunswick Internal Services Agency (NBISA) and to design associated training materials and develop an organizational structure for service delivery.

This approach led to the introduction of the first shared services for Accounts Payable, IT Service Desk, Computing Facilities and Payroll & Benefits services to 25 GNB Departments beginning in April of 2010. With a “rolling wave” deployment plan, 70 percent of all departments were deployed by the end of 2010, with the last wave commencing in March 2011.

Download the case study to learn how to implement a multi-functional shared services organization in a public sector environment.