A Government Performance Management System pivotal to realise Sri Lanka’s socioeconomic dream

State Ministry of Minor Crop Development and Export Promotion Additional Secretary J.M. Thilaka Jayasundera

By Harsha Udayakantha Peiris

A Government Performance Management System (GPMS) covers all key aspects of performance management and is inspired by the understanding of the important social and economic development gains to be made by improving government effectiveness. Enhanced delivery of public services and effective implementation of public policies, programs and projects affect the welfare of all citizens. 

There is generally a widespread consensus that government performance is critical to service delivery and achievement of national development goals, including the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development Goals (SDG). The competitive and comparative advantage of nations depend primarily on the performance and effectiveness of government, implementation of sound policies, and optimal utilisation of limited resources. An ‘effective’ performance management system is therefore, a critical requirement for the public service. 

“It is utmost important that the performance of any country should be measured. However, with regard to public sector, today, we do not have a common performance management system established in our country,” says State Ministry of Minor Crop Development and Export Promotion Additional Secretary J.M. Thilaka Jayasundera. “It is pathetic to see that we lack an objective based budgeting system or a guidance towards such a mechanism in our process of annual budgetary allocations in most of our public institutions,” she says. 

According to Jayasundera, preparation of the annual Action Plan in most of the local institutions follows an irregular methodology based only on the wish and will of that individual institution which most of the time disregards the national interest. “This is one reason for why we cannot measure or weigh what the objective of an Action Plan and how far its objectives are achieved, which in other words, to measure its progress and its percentage on a national basis,” she says. 

J.M. Thilaka Jayasundera and the international team led by her in the Advance Training Program in Government Performance Management (Asia Edition) 2021 organised and conducted by the Public Sector Governance Unit, Governance and Peace Division of the Commonwealth Secretariat in London won the Commonwealth Award for Excellence Trophy for Commonwealth Advanced Online Training Program in Government Performance Management at an international online award ceremony on 3 March for the CFR made for Lanka Sugar Company, based on the Strategic Management and Accountability for Results Toolkit (SMART), also highlighting yet another international recognition to Sri Lanka’s public sector in women’s excellence in leadership amidst International Women’s Day celebrations. 

The award ceremony was held under the patronage of Commonwealth Secretary-General RT, Patricia Janet Scotland QC also the first woman to hold the post. The occasion was also graced by Commonwealth Secretariat Special Envoy for SDG Implementation Prof. Prajapati Trivedi. The other countries in the team led by Jayasundera included India, Maldives and Seychelles.

The training program was based on design and implementation of performance management systems, which contributed to the building of a more effective government and was held under for segments that included Africa and Europe, Asia, Caribbean and North America and Pacific region. The Commonwealth is a voluntary association of 54 independent and equal countries. It is home to 2.4 billion people and includes both advanced economies and developing countries. 32 of its members are small states including many island nations. 

International experience suggests that 80% of the performance of any organisation is determined by the quality of its systems. Therefore, skills and knowledge of practitioners in an organisation or a country in performance improvement, measurement and management, based on theory and international experience, and cutting-edge tools and techniques, should be improved at a constant pace and frequency. 

The widely discussed topics to ensure its sustainable and smooth implementation as a smart online application have been declared as explanations about government performance, meaning of government performance, how to improve government performance, how to measure government performance, international best practice and options for policy makers, use of performance agreements in public sector, how to design performance-related incentives, how to design and implement a Public Grievance Redress System, how to design and implement citizens’/clients’ charters, how to design and implement a system to measure and promote innovation in public administration, frontiers of e-governance, role of effective communication in government, how to develop a strategic plan in government departments, how to implement ISO 9001:2008 in government departments, designing effective performance information management systems in government, creating Knowledge Management (KM) systems in government, creating managing communities of practice in government and institutional mechanism for managing performance in government. 

Importance of a central monitoring mechanism

“At present, Sri Lanka’s socio-economic process is based on the ‘Saubhagyaye Dekma’ (Vistas of Prosperity and Splendour) policy statement of President Gotabaya Rajapaksa. It is a way paving towards a people centric production. Therefore, it is important to understand and look into the fact that how many public sector institutions have by now, prepared their five- or three-year Road Maps based on this policy statement. There should be an authoritative arm or an authorised unit to monitor into this. 

A country, in its socio-economic development towards prosperity actually needs a central monitoring mechanism. It can also be identified as a monitoring and evaluation methodology. And it should be a powerful mechanism that comes under the Head of State. Today, our neighbouring economies such as India, Bangladesh Bhutan and Brunei have successfully implemented the Government Performance Management System (GPMS) introduced by the Commonwealth Secretariat. Each of these countries has now adapted its annual State development agenda into the GPMS. 

What happens here is, that the public institutions or the Government Ministries should prepare their detailed annual Action Plan according to their long term, five of three-year plans taking the national interest into a prioritised consideration. The Brunei experience is one of the most interesting implementations in this regard,” she says. 

The Brunei experience 

According to Jayasundera, the Nation of Brunei has a stronger government policy where state policies such as in import and export, agriculture, education and health sectors cannot be changed under any government elected, according to its mere wish and will. 

“Whenever or wherever a change is required, the policy is further developed instead of demolishing the policy in total. In Brunei, all ministries of the government prepare their Action Plans based on their five- or three-year Road Map and according to the national interest in the first place. It is then adapted to the GPMS soft platform and the respective annual Performance Agreement of each Ministry is directly signed between the Secretary of the Ministry and the President of Brunei. So, here we see a stronger responsibility taking place. Since the GPMS is a software-based measurement and evaluation system, it is a self-evaluation mechanism that allows easy monitoring not only towards the output of the performance agreement but also the outcome and the accurate achievement of objectives,” she says. 

Identifying obstacles for development

“So, now, we see that one major obstacle of achieving our socio-economic development is that we lack a suitable, sustainable and proper government performance management and measurement system. Although almost every public sector institution prepares its annual Action Plan, there is hardly anyone to accept the overall responsibility over its performance and implementation. Therefore, there is no rating or punishment system for erroneous practice of it. We audit our budgetary allocation for accuracy of expenditure, only on a physical and financial basis. Apparently, this is not a result-oriented evaluation process. We never weigh or measure the outcome of this expenditure. So, we must consolidate into account if we have properly identified and prepared the Key Performance Indicators (KPI) and if we have achieved them successfully. 

“If we can implement this advance Government Performance Management System (GPMS) in Sri Lanka, it would clearly measure and evaluate where we are now, where we want to be and how we do go there. Here, the most important thing is the fact that how we measure our progress because only then we can measure the outcome and impact. Unfortunately, at present, we do not see this taking place in many of our public institutions,” she says. 

The annual Global Competitiveness Report (GCR published by the World Economic Forum ranks countries based on the Global Competitiveness Index (GCI). In 2018, the World Economic Forum introduced a new methodology emphasising the role of human capital, innovation, resilience and agility, as not only drivers but also defining features of economic success in the 4th Industrial Revolution. As a result, the GCI scale changed to 1 to 100 from 1 to 7, with higher average score meaning higher degree of competitiveness. 

The report has been made up of 98 variables organised into 12 pillars with the most important including: institutions; infrastructure; ICT adoption; macroeconomic stability; health; skills; product market; labour market; financial system; market size; business dynamism; and innovation capability. 

In the 2018 edition of Global Competitive Index (GCI), Sri Lanka is ranked at the 84th position out of 140 countries. “According to the index the main reason for this downfall has been identified as inefficient government bureaucracy which is not a political issue but a problem caused by the lack of a proper system in the state institutional system. Among the second and third reasons remain policy inconsistency and poor work ethics culture respectively. Besides and amongst other reasons for our low ranked position in the GCI exist, the unstable political system in the country, lack of easy access to financial utilisation as well as obstacles pertaining to procurement and taxation. 

“It is true that evaluation is required to find out where the fault occurred and how to rectify it but yet, it is only a post-mortem. What is more important is a proper monitoring mechanism that could be achieved through a Government Performance Management System (GPMS). It is high time that Sri Lanka should implement the GPMS without delay, in accordance with the present policy document of the government, if we are to join the global socio-economic run with emerging neighbour economies who were far behind us at the very beginning of the race,” Jayasundera emphasises.