III. Corporate Priorities

The PPSC’s overall organizational priority is set out in its mission and values statement. In 2009–2010, the PPSC worked on four corporate administrative priorities to support the organization’s operational mandate. Those priorities were:

• recruitment and retention;
• safety and security of employees;
• measuring organizational performance; and
• knowledge management.

For 2010–2011, the PPSC has renewed these administrative priorities to continue to build upon the work being done in support of the PPSC’s mandate, mission, and values.

Recruitment and Retention

Investing in a diverse, multicultural and multilingual workforce through recruitment and retention is an ongoing process. Ensuring that employees feel valued and appreciated, and that the organization is viewed as an employer of choice is essential, particularly in light of employment alternatives that exist with provincial prosecution services or in the private sector.

In order to foster an environment where staff recruitment and retention is encouraged, the PPSC took a number of steps, including:

• the establishment of a working group to move forward the LA Group Project, Ensuring Excellence. The group will work on the development of a career path for prosecutors, which includes enhancing training opportunities and finalizing competency profiles; and
• the implementation of a national recruitment strategy.

Safety and Security of Employees

The safety and security of employees remains a corporate priority for the PPSC. A Departmental Security Officer was appointed in April 2009 and PPSC-managed security activities such as personnel security and physical security are now in place to facilitate employee security screenings and safeguarding of the PPSC’s offices. With implementation of this infrastructure now in place, the PPSC will focus its attention on two primary activities:

• the establishment of an Employee Protection Program to protect employees against threats and incidents of intimidation; and
• the establishment of Business Continuity plans in Headquarters and in regions to ensure the continued delivery of PPSC services in the event of contingencies including a pandemic illness.

Measuring Organizational Performance

In support of its accountabilities as a federal government organization, the PPSC continues to pursue improvements to its performance measurement framework. Key performance indicators have been included in the PPSC integrated planning process as elements to be considered or monitored in corporate business and human resource plans for the upcoming fiscal year.

As of April 2009, the PPSC implemented a revised and simplified national protocol governing timekeeping practices. This protocol ensures that more complete and reliable timekeeping information is available to guide decision-making, overtime compensation and cost recovery. In addition, the PPSC worked to simplify and restructure various case management data sets for specific activities that relate to criminal, regulatory and economic prosecutions. It has also simplified the data entry elements for file opening and closing protocols and implemented procedures to more closely monitor compliance with these protocols.

The PPSC underwent a significant organizational restructuring in late 2008. In 2009–2010, work was done to harmonize case management system data with the new structure. As a result, work was postponed on performance measurement processes requiring modifications to the case management system while conversion activities were underway.

Knowledge Management

The objective of the knowledge management effort is to develop tools to support the sharing of information by employees to help ensure that the PPSC’s mandate is achieved.

The work undertaken during 2009–2010 saw the development of a knowledge management framework, taxonomy and metadata for a number of key knowledge databases. During 2010–2011, the established knowledge databases will be loaded, maintained and made available to all PPSC prosecutors, agents, paralegals and legal assistants. Knowledge management will continue to be a corporate priority for the PPSC during 2010–2011.