Anna Hirschfeld
Senior Director, Regional Head of Canada
We work with Canada’s federal and provincial governments, supporting the digital transformation of public services.
We bring an international perspective on digital public services, helping Canadian civic leaders embed bold reforms to improve citizens’ experiences of government.
Our expertise is in building better services for users, and implementing the institutional reforms which enable those services to respond to changing needs.
This involves helping governments make impactful changes to their cultures, skills, capabilities, and technology choices.
Our Canada team consists of experienced digital practitioners who have led transformational change in government agencies on both sides of the Atlantic.
We have both provided independent assurance and turnaround leadership to major government technology programmes, and set up world-class digital teams applying new ways of working.
In 2017, we helped found the federal Canadian Digital Service. PD was a strategic partner during the team's early growth and success, supporting teams to develop a Digital Service Standard and cross-government platform services.
Since then, we have been working with provinces across Canada.
We have advised the Ontario government on their digital strategy, building a new and expert digital capability, and onboarding their first Deputy Minister-level Chief Digital Officer.
Since 2018, we've been working in Nova Scotia to transform its digital capacity, helping to build an 800-strong unified digital ministry operating across the whole of government.
We help political leaders and public servants change how government works, founding and scaling digital teams and units.
We review organisations’ dependencies, technology programmes and supplier relationships to reduce organisations' risk.
We design and deliver bespoke programmes to train and develop civil servants in digital era ways of working.
We support the transformation of critical public services, working hand-in-hand with policy, operations and digital teams.
Public Digital has been instrumental in changing ways of working across the Nova Scotia government, helping us move away from out-of-date waterfall projects and programmes to a more agile, user-centred, iterative and product-centred approach.
Through the Public Digital team’s coaching, mentoring and role modelling, we have brought policy, technology and operational delivery to work together in new ways across Government.
As a result, governing and delivering services is now more sustainable, and more responsive to citizens' and stakeholders' needs.