Integrated Personnel Performance System (PPS)

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Permalink Reply by David Ferraz on July 28, 2008 at 3:42am

Í've made some research abou the topic and attached an abstract presented to a conference.

If you have any question please contact me: david.ferraz@ina.pt

David Ferraz

Attachments:

• IASIA 2008 Rodrigues Ferraz.pdf, 107 KB

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Permalink Reply by Arunaselam Rasappan on July 29, 2008 at 3:51pm

Dear David - thanks for sharing this abstract with the members. Am sure members would be interested to read your paper...perhaps you can post the full paper on this forum?

Re, the models you mentioned, it should be pointed out that there are several models in use and one has to carefully assess these models to see which is practical and action-oriented. I always believe that concepts and models are only as good as their usage. If a model or approach is just conceptual, then however good the concept is, it will not be useful unless it is implementable and is able to produce the desired results.

Once again, thanks for sharing the abstract.

Aru Rasappan

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Permalink Reply by Arunaselam Rasappan on August 11, 2008 at 2:29am

11 August, 2008

Dear Colleagues,

As planned, we will commence discussions on the personnel performance component under the Integrated Results-Based Management System with effect from today. We realise there is a delay but this was to enable our francophone colleagues's discussions to catch up with us.

To kick start the discussion on the PPS, I have a few basic questions for all of us:

a. To what extent are you satisfied with the prevailing personnel performance system in your country?
b. Can you share with us how the personnel performance management system in your country deals with personnel performance in relation to substantive program and organizational performance?
c. Do you think there is a need for change with our personnel performance management system?
d. How would you like to see the personnel performance system be modified, if at all?
e. If you feel that there is no need for any change, please share with us why you think there is no need for change or improvements.

The above questions are just to kick start the discussion but over the week, I shall be posing more fundamental questions on these and other related aspects for our reflection.

Thanks and I hope there will be some active participation from all members.

Regards

Aru Rasappan

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Permalink Reply by Dr. Rosa Muraguri-Mwololo on August 11, 2008 at 6:03am

Hi Aru- they say What Is Important Is Rewarded; and What Is Rewarded Is Done. Experience with many government departments suggest a lack of clear incentives in support of RBM application. Reward and incentive systems, as key drivers of change, should recognize RBM application. A misaligned reward system may cause the governments to appear to care about the wrong things instead of caring for actions that guaranteed the attainment of results. regretably, systems can unconsciously drive the behavior of the government staffs by formally and informally rewarding or sanctioning some wrong things. For RBM to have greater buy-in and usefulness, it has to be appreciated as a learning tool that helps staff to succeed, as opposed to a “policing and control” tool. Governments cannot afford to have policies and practices that protect and preserve negative cultures or inhibits RBM application.

It is important to realise that RBM is not a stand-alone management application- it will work best only when in alignment with other government personnel policies. Because of disincentives wittingly or unwittingly caused my policy misalignments, most government staff are applying RBM are doing so under some kind of coerced compliance through Performance Contracts that are not adequaetly linked to rewards. For RBM to embed, governments need commitment and not compliance. It is critical that government using RBM critically analyze personel policieces for consistency in support of RBM. Such policies should be analyzed not only in terms of their substance, but also in terms of process and symbolism. Existing policies should work in concert and in consistency, complementing each other in support of RBM. In many instances practices and policies will either work together as a package in support of RBM or they fight each other, causing RBM to crash. One question to ask is whether core processes in a government system e.g. planning, budget, evaluation, HR, communications, audit adequately support RBM. For instance, do criteria for hiring, promotion procedures, discipline, reward practices, socialization methods, performance appraisals, budgets, and reporting- get applied in a results oriented manner? Are government's hiring, firing, rewarding and budgetary allocations political or results-oriented?

Management actions are very telling, revealing, and indicative, and much organizational behavior is created by what management rewards or punishes. Government's managerial attitudes and actions can promote or discourage practices and values that support RBM application.

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Permalink Reply by Arunaselam Rasappan on August 12, 2008 at 4:47pm

Dear Rosa,

Thank you for your observations and suggestions...they are all spot on. In some countries which claim they are also implementing RBM and the PPS, I have found the so-called RBM compliant PPS to be nothing more than a set of work plans for the year for individuals. The individual work plans actually are a list of outputs and activities that the individual will produce/complete for the year. But this is NOT what we called integrated personnel performance...where there are little or no links between the individual's performance in work completion to the substantive results that that work will produce and consequently, the links between those results and the expected results from the individual's work unit and organizational entities above the work unit.

The issue you mentioned about meaningful personnel performance is also important. We do not want a totally compliance driven personnel system that only works when under supervision or tight oversight. There has to be a sense of understanding, appreciation, ownership, and internatilization among personnel to be able to work efficiently and effectively towards substantive results. Obviously, a range of support HR and HRD policies and systems has also to be in place to support a results-oriented personnel performance situation. Apart from the normal issues of rewards and santions, it is also equally important for individuals to have a clear understanding, appreciation, and ownership of their work and the expected results. They must also have the relevant capacity to perform and it should essentially be the responsibility of management to ensure that the individuals have the necesary knowledge, skills, and competencies to be able to perform well.

Sometimes, the focus on results is so strong, that in one country which has implemented the IRBM system in totality, the reference group deliberating the appraisal system for an individual in a managerial position, actually suggested that at least 90-95% of his/her total performance score should be based on the achievement of results by that individual! Obviously, this is quite extreme, for individuals in top management positions should be assessed not only on program results but also a number of other important dimensions.

As you rightly point out, personnel performance is not so simple as made out to be in many countries with simplistic work completion assessments. I'd like to hear the experiences and views of our other members before delving deeper into this topic.

Thanks once again for highlighting some fundamental issues on personnel performance. Lets hear from our other AfCoP colleagues.

Aru Rasappan

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Permalink Reply by Arunaselam Rasappan on August 15, 2008 at 4:09am

Dear Colleagues,

Further to my earlier set of questions on personnel performance matters, I would like to put forth some additional points for our review and consideration. For those of you who are also on the AsiaCoP, my apologies for the cross-posting.

The importance of personnel in the IRBM system cannot be overemphasized. As most of us may realise, typically, in a developing country, the national budget is made up of 70% operating budget and 30% development budget. Of the 70% operating budget, close to 60-70% of that goes towards personnel costs. This in reality translates to about 50% of the national budget. These figures are of course indicative and may vary from country to country. In some developing countries, the development budget is less than 20%. In some developing countries, donors' contribution to budget support can be as high as 70%.

Given the above, consider that in most of these countries, there is much effort towards measuring the performance of the development budget (which makes up only about 30% of the national budget). In the countries where I've been working as policy/tchnical advisor on IRBM, I am confounded by the extent of effort on the development budget - everyone talks about the national development plan and how they need to focus more on it and measure it etc etc. But there is hardly much attention to measuring the performance under the 70% of the national budget? Why is this so?

Consider another point: In a typical developing country, the actual development results are produced by the operating budget and not the development budget! Why is this the case? This is due to the fact that in most of these traditional budgeting scenarios, the development budget is focused on captial assets and less on programme costs. But in reality one knows by simple logic that it is not the building of new hospitals that produce better health in a country but the health programmes (among others). Consider this now - these health programmes are run by the personnel in the public sector and it is these personnel that actually contribute to development results! And that is where the bulk of the operating budget costs goes to i.e. personnel costs.

So the BIG question is this: why are we typically fosusing on the 30% development budget (capital assets acquisition) (though it is important) when logically speaking, we should be focusing more on the 70% of the national budget?

Second question: If the personnel costs for a country eats up about 50% of the national budget, how are we assessing the performance of this 50% budget expense? In other words, how are we approaching and assessing the performance of personnel in the public sector?

I shall leave us all to ponder on the above statement for a day or so and then I am going to pose some more fundamental questions on personnel for us to consider.

Please feel free to raise questions, share experiences, and/or provide new insights into the points that I've made above. In particular, we would welcome your sharing the situation in your country so that we can challenge or reinforce what I've stated above. Check the maths colleagues - they are fundamentally wrong somewhere!

Regards.

Aru Rasappan

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Permalink Reply by Solomon Mhlanga on August 28, 2008 at 5:53am

Dear Aru,

Thank you Aru for bringing up this very important discussion on personnel performance. I would like to share with collegues how the Zimbabwe public sector has attempted to deal with personnel performance in relation to substantive organisational performance.

A decision was made to review the system in line with Results Based Management Principles after several weaknesses were observed. The review covered the following four major areas of personnel performance:
Performance Appraisal;
Human Resources Development;
Human Resources Management and
Information Communication Technology.

If I can dwell on some aspects of the Performance Appraisal component, some of the observations of the current appraisal process reveiled that:
the performance management system focused on activities rather than results;
the process in the appraisal cycle focused on the final rating; within an appraisal range of 1-5 with 1 being the lowest, most appraisals if not 90% of them were appraised as 4s despite the fact that the public opinion on the performance of these organisations was poor;
one single form with similar attributes was used to appraise the whole range of workers in an organisation from the unskilled worker to the Head of Department;

Now some of the areas being looked at within the current appraisal system with the view of improving them include:
policies regarding appraisal;
rules and regulations governing the appraisal process;
the process involved in appraisal;
forms and formats used;
organisational structures invoved in the appraisal;
appraisal components which are key result areas, goals, inputs, outputs, outcomes and impacts.

The aim is to come up with an instrument which would assist the interlinkages between the expected departmental outputs and outcomes and the individual members contribution and the causal links between the resources invested in activities especially developmental activities and the results achieved.

As an example three performance appraisal forms are therefore being developed for three different levels as follows;
1. Heads of Departments whose performance assessment would be based on the members' performance output, outcome and budget utilisation.
2. Middle level managers whose assessment would be based on the members performance output.
3. Lower level unskilled workers whose assessment would be based on completion of agreed tasks.

This is a process still under development and the hope is that the appraisal process can be more meaningful as we move towards Results Based Management Principles.

Regards,

Solomon Mhlanga

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Permalink Reply by Arunaselam Rasappan on August 28, 2008 at 7:47pm

Dear Solomon,

Thanks for sharing with us the experiences from Zimbabwe. It is indeed interesting to hear that you have initiated a process of making your personnel performance system results-based. Obviously, there are many aspects of personnel performance that need to be reviewed and adjusted to make sure the personnel performance is truly results-oriented and RBM compliant.

I'd like to hear from our other colleagues on AfCoP on their experiences with personnel performance before I provide some additional thoughts and insights into this critical component of IRBM.

I hope that our other colleagues would provide such feedback in the next few days.

Regards

Aru Rasappan

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Permalink Reply by Zaam Ssali on September 3, 2008 at 6:13am

Dear Arun,

There has been an initiative within the Public Service in Uganda for over five years called Result Oriented Management (ROM) but without explicit mention of PPS. What is the linkage between the two?

Zaam

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Permalink Reply by Tamirat Yacob on September 9, 2008 at 12:53pm

Dear Arun,

Thanks for this post. I have been reading and following the discuion very well but not able to contribute as i wanted. As i was very busy for the past one month as we were having a general meeting in our Ministry about Business Process Reengineering (BPR) - which focuses at bringing fundamental thinking, redesigning processes and dramatic change at how we do our business. And it was aimed at making the provision or delivery of service customer oriented and result focused. It is a process where different tasks are linked to bring institutional/national results. And at that time we were also discussing the issue of personal performance systems.

As the meeting concludes one of the basic things that were understood is that we need change in how we do the business. We have to make the ministry achieve its vision and goal.

In the past we were doing our business in a “task oriented and focused” manner-not each process connected end-to-end. No process is sufficiently linked with the preceding or the forthcoming process, which together jointly delivers the result. That was one of the problems identified and we redesigned our processes to make that link realized and get the desired result. All these things were based on the consensus that WE NEED CHANGE!!

For sure we need change! No one will ever doubt that, in our ministry, Ministry of Finance and Economic Development of Ethiopia. The way we were doing our business were not up to the standard and more result oriented rather “task focused”, customer satisfaction is not that much encouraging and even how we do our day to day jobs are not in a way that could bring institutional success let alone country’s goal.

The current personal performance system in a country is so poor that it is not empowering, encouraging and rewarding. It is rather a system where one can’t be measured by it performance and merit. So did the management understand this there come the need to make change in this area and that is why we are in now in the process of the BPR.

The Personal Performance system in our country used to be more “task oriented” and not much focused on organizational or substantive program. So there I can say almost it was not in a state where the expert is rated according to his performance to achieve the national or the organizational/institutional goal or vision.

These are some of my reflections and I will see if I could add some and try to answer the remaining.

But one of my question or just comment on this tread is that if there is a good experience on these agenda in Africa and Asian countries like Malaysia, South Korea and alike, I think Arun I hope you well tell us more before concluding this discussion, would like to read and learn a lot. Besides I need to learn about the failed ones as they could be the best ways and not to repeat them in our way also.

Best regards,


Tamirat Yacob,
Development Planning and Research Expert,
Ministry of Finance and economic Development
Addis Ababa, Ethiopia

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