According to the Constitution of South Africa, 1996 (Act 108 of 1996), a municipality must structure and manage its administrative, budgeting and planning processes to give priority to the basic needs of the community, and promote the social and economic development of the community.
City of Tshwane Metropolitan Municipality (CTMM) made a decision to implement the Balanced Scorecard as its performance management methodology of choice in order to assist the implementation of the Integrated Development Plan (IDP) for the city.
The original performance system was paper-based and city management found it difficult to manage as it was quite cumbersome, difficult to track performance, difficult to manage cross departmental key performance indicators (KPI), and most of all difficult to align individual key performance areas (KPA) to organisational objectives.
CTMM saw a clear need to automate its existing paper-based system and through a vigorous tender process selected QPR Collaborative Suite as the solution of choice.
"We selected QPR as it provided us with the ability to automate, align and track complex performance information across the different levels of our organisation. We found the system very easy to use and as such could own and maintain the system with the skills that we have in our organisation. In phase one of the implementation we created the first four reporting level scorecards that range from municipal manager, chief operating officer, senior executive officers, and general managers.
"Phase two of the implementation consists of cascading down to operational level 5&6 where we will implement scorecards and processes for our managers and deputy managers. Through effective change management, communication and training we have been able to educate approximately 95% of our senior management team to actively track and monitor performance as well as actively collaborate through action planning to improve performance," says Harriet Kwinda, HR General Manager.
The CTMM solution should fit well with the Tshwane development management cycle that requires communication of CTMM vision and strategy, projects and performance to target, collaboration on business planning, budgets and target setting, measurement of objectives and individual KPAs, and the value-adding process driving this cycle to the people activity and responsibility level.
"Through process management with QPR we have clearly identified and communicated the responsible areas and steps necessary to implement mandate when looking at our development management cycle as a whole," says Kwinda.
In the future, CTMM plans to incorporate business planning as part of the QPR implementation as it is crucial to utilise the performance and process management system within the Tshwane development management cycle. The system will incorporate the following:
Planning
* Strategy formulation
* Budget planning
* Performance target agreement
Monitoring
* Follow-up of actuals
* Forecasting
* Proactive and corrective actions
Reporting
* Monthly financial reports
* Monthly performance reports
"It is crucial that we utilise the historical information and trends from the system to plan our future service delivery to our citizens. Since the QPR solution is so flexible, it enables us to truly drive our business planning with the system. It is my vision that all the information needed to fulfil our mandate would be easily accessible and managed within the system, allowing us to export all the official information it our CTMM business plan format," says Kwinda.
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