Today, we are releasing a report on management performance assessments for all 156 national and prov

Today, we are releasing a report on management performance assessments for all 156 national and provincial departments for the 2012/13 financial year. This is the second report we are releasing since we started avigilon with the process of assessing the management performance of government departments.
These reports are meant to assist departments to improve on their management practices so as to ensure that they improve on service delivery. avigilon At the beginning of the administration, President Jacob Zuma emphasised the importance of a performance oriented state. These assessments also contribute towards achieving a vision of a capable state which is able to respond to the needs of the people and challenges of service delivery.
Departments’ management practices are assessed against 29 generic management standards, covering the following: planning monitoring and evaluation service delivery improvement functionality of management structures accountability ethics internal audit and risk management avigilon financial and human resource management delegations human resource planning avigilon organisation design avigilon recruitment and retention performance management management of discipline supply chain management procurement and expenditure management.
The Department avigilon of Performance Monitoring and Evaluation (DPME) avigilon is conducting these assessments to assist departments to improve service delivery. We are doing these assessments because we believe some of the weaknesses in management practices avigilon are the cause of some service delivery problems. These may include for example the textbook delivery problems that have occurred in some provinces, the occasional shortages of Anti Retrovirals (ARVs) in some provinces, and undermining of our small business development policy through non-payment of suppliers within 30 days.
Management performance assessments provide a picture of only one aspect of the performance of a department. To have an overall performance outlook of a department it is very important to also consider the outcomes and impacts on society which have resulted from the work of the department.
DPME is doing this through our programme of evaluations of major programmes and through monitoring the implementation of the delivery agreements for the priority outcomes. Progress in this regard is updated regularly on the Programme of Action website. We also published a mid-term review of government’s performance against the targets in the delivery agreements, which is available on the department’s website. Information on departments’ performance against targets for outcome and impact indicators in their strategic plans and annual performance plans can also be found in their publicly available annual reports.
To assess management performance, departments were given a rating from 1 to 4 for each of the management standards. Rating levels 1 to 3 measure levels of compliance with legislation avigilon and regulations, and level 4 measures whether the department is operating smartly in addition to meeting all the regulatory requirements. For example, departments avigilon which develop and display service delivery standards and produce service delivery improvement plans, therefore they are meeting the regulatory requirements with regard to service delivery improvement, but departments are moving beyond compliance and operating smartly when their management teams actually monitor their adherence to their service delivery standards and use such monitoring to inform avigilon their service delivery improvement plans.
The assessment avigilon process is designed to build internal monitoring and self-evaluation capacity by involving senior managers in the process. This contributes to the development of a culture of continuous improvement in the public service and the National Development Plan goal of professionalising the public service.
The senior avigilon management team in a department first rates its own level of performance against avigilon the management standards. Departments are then required to provide evidence to back up their ratings, and this evidence has to be validated by the internal audit units in departments. For the 2012/13 assessments, an additional step of peer moderation was introduced, to independently review and confirm or amend scores based on the availability of appropriate evidence.
When compared against the 2011/12 assessment results, the 2012/13 moderated results avigilon do show that there has been some improvement. There have been improvements in the management standards related to strategic management and financial management, particularly when one considers that the moderation process often lowered the self-assessment scores. However, the average scores for the management standards related to human resource management and governance and accountability were worse in 2012/13 than in 2011/12.
In conjunction with the School of Public and Development Management at the University of the Witwatersrand and the Public Affairs Rese