Ministries must work together to evolve desirable performance
Speakers say at a regional conference
Staff Reporter
All the ministries must work seamlessly to evolve a desirable performance management system through efficient and effective use of resources, international relation affairs advisor to the Prime Minister, Gowher Rizvi, has said.
Rizvi expressed this view at a regional conference on Government Performance Management System (GPMS), jointly organised by the BRAC Institute of Governance and Development (BIGD) and the Cabinet Division, in partnership with the World Bank, at a hotel in the capital on Sunday.
Rizvi also spoke on the real scenario of performance management, an important tool to manage, monitor and quantify. Government officials should address both qualitative and quantitative aspects, he said.
At the beginning of the session, Zeaul Alam,secretary of the Cabinet Division, presented a keynote paper.
Alam dealt with several things such as the background of the GPMS, the purpose of the Annual Performance Agreement (APA), and its strengths and challenges.
In 2015, Bangladesh had signed the agreement on Annual Performance Agreement (APA).
The main purpose of the APA was to shift ministry focus from being process-oriented to result-oriented, and to ensure accountability, transparency, and the effective use of resources, said Alam.
Establishing linkages between the performance of the organisations and personnel had been a challenge of the GPMS, an area in which Bhutan had done well compared to Bangladesh, he observed.
Principal coordinator of Sustainable Develop-ment Goals in the Prime Ministers Office, Abul Kalam Azad, said the governments budget and the APA were prepared in the months of July and June (of the following year), and the Annual Confidential Report (ACR), better known as officers performance appraisal, was prepared in January and December, resulting in a mismatch that demanded resolution.
Zeaul Alams keynote paper also showed that inadequate incentives for better performance posed a challenge, and Abul Kalam Azad suggested that effective performance bonus could be a possible solution.
Zeaul Alam cited two other difficulties: knowledge gap and tendency of soft targeting.
Mr Chencho, head of the GPMD, office of the prime minster and cabinet secretariat of Bhutan, in his keynote paper highlighted issues such as the annual performance planning process and challenges of the GPMS.
He also pointed out that earlier the GPMS had four segments such as five year planning, annual budgeting, expenditure reporting and a midterm review of the five-year plan.
Now two more things have been added in this new system: one is a half-yearly performance dialogue and the other is a year-end performance evaluation, which, eventually, help tremendously improve the efficiency of the government system, Chencho added. He pointed to the challenges the Bhutan government faced such as the development capacity indicator, ownership of the system by the agencies and the aligning of central agencies around one common purpose.
To combat corruption in the government system, Prajapati Trivedi, former secretary of performance management division of India, said the GPMS seldom worked for the top 10 per cent and bottom 10 per cent, but was effective for the middle 80 per cent of government employees.
The GPMS is a framework formulated to enhance the effectiveness of public policies and service delivery in South Asian countries.
The primary emphasis in public sector management was to ensure that the government administration began stressing results that benefited communities, built public confidence, and initiated and sustained management structures and performance-based organisational cultures,
along with other related practices, in the public policy sector.
The main goal of this conference was to bring together government officials, practitioners, and leading scholars to take stock and collectivelyenvision current and future innovations in public sector performance management, leadership and governance.
