2021 - Richard Dalpé
The winner of the 2021 Heintzman Leadership Award is Richard Dalpé, former Manager, Service Policy, Treasury Board Secretariat of Canada. Richard Dalpé has been a champion of client centric service design and has been dedicated in seeing this carried through into policy guidance to support federal departments and agencies in reviewing and improving services for all Canadians. His enthusiasm, expertise, analytical skills, and forward-thinking abilities in regard to service management have made him a trusted advisor within this sector.
Richard Dalpé had a 30-year career with the Government of Canada where he directly transformed the way services are delivered at all levels of government across Canada. Richard’s contributions can be found in a number of areas including social (education), environmental, economics and service policies.
Early in his career, Richard managed grants and contribution programs delivering funds to organizations and individuals across Canada. Richard worked on the Canada Millennium Scholarship Fund distributing bursaries and scholarships. He worked with provincial deputy ministers to present a comprehensive analysis of Canada’s education policies and reforms at OECD and UNESCO meetings in Europe. In 2005, he spoke at the 2005 United National Climate Change Conference which closed with the adoption of more than 40 decisions to strengthen global efforts to fight climate change and was dubbed the most productive UN Climate Change Conference at the time. At Infrastructure Canada, Richard enabled multi-million dollar development projects across Canada that focused on urban diversification and redevelopment which often required the transformation of federal government lands that needed decontamination.
While at the Treasury Board Secretariat of Canada, Richard was instrumental in the development and implementation of the Government of Canada’s first Policy on Service in 2014, which, in many ways was the beginning of a fundamental change in how the Government of Canada approached service delivery. He led the development and implementation of the first federal service inventories, creating not only a comprehensive list of the Government of Canada services, but also enabling the capture of critical service performance information from a whole of Government perspective. Richard led the development of the first Guidelines on Service Management, as well as the development of a framework for the assessment, development and publication of service standards. This work supported the development of meaningful service standards that take into consideration client expectations of service delivery. In 2017-18, Richard made important contributions to the development of the GC Service Strategy, as well as to the performance measurement framework to provide insight into whether service objectives were being achieved. More recently, he leveraged this experience in leading the work to ensure management of services was conducted as an integrated function with other domains such as IM, IT, Data and Cyber Security. His role in supporting the development of the service management components of the Treasury Board Policy on Service and Digital, which came into effect in April 2020, was integral to the success of the policy development process.
In Spring 2021, Richard helped establish a Service Officials Council for the Designated Officials across the Government of Canada. This table breaks down silos across the federal government by bringing together these individuals and providing a space for collaboration, sharing best practices and problem-solving for major service management issues.
His latest work included leading a transformational initiative with a focus on making government services easy to find and offering a consistent user experience. The aim is to develop a framework for service improvement based on challenges and opportunities identified by service departments that will lead to key actions that improve service delivery across government such as streamlining back-end processes and correcting inefficiencies.
Richard also spearheaded the creation and consolidation of 1200+ services and related performance information into what is now released annually as the GC Service Inventory and visualized on Service Performance Dashboards. This has brought about more transparency and accountability for government in managing its services. Between July 2020 to August 2021, the dashboards had over 4000 visitors and the dataset itself was downloaded 1000 times. In his role as a community builder and enabler, he created and built an online community of service analysts across government. Membership grew from 60 to over 1100 members in less than three years.
Richard served as Federal Co-Chair of the Joint Councils Research Committee for more than three years providing leadership in identifying and overseeing a range of activities to advance the research agenda of the Joint Councils.
In recognition of his outstanding, innovative, and transformational leadership in promoting citizen-centred approaches to service delivery, the Institute for Citizen-Centred Service is proud to award Richard Dalpé the 2021 Heintzman Leadership Award.
