New concept introduced to monitor departmental heads

By JEFFREY ELAPA
The performance of departmental heads will be monitored and assessed using a new concept.
The concept is the first of its kind in the history of the public service in Papua New Guinea.
A departmental head will be reappointed or asked to resign, based on his or her performance.
The new performance-based concept, introduced by Department of Personnel Management, will raise bar for appointments of heads of bureaucracies and State-owned entities.
Departmental heads will be
assessed through key performance indicators and key results areas.
These will be posted on a locally-designed management system that will be used by all departments and Government agencies to measure the performance of bureaucrats.
Department of Inter-Government Relations is the first department to trial the assessment process.
Secretary Dickson Guina signed his key performance indicators and key result areas with Minister for Inter-Government Relations Kevin Isifu yesterday.
The minister will be the final person to access the performance management system and make an independent rating that could rank from 1 to 5.
Isifu said the concept would complement the new department structure approved by the Personnel Management.
He said under the structure, two new divisions and more than 20 new positions were created.
Isifu said it was important to start measuring the performance of departmental head and those down the line to make sure “performers” were employed in the public service.
Guina said it was good that his department was used as a “guinea pig” to trial out the new concept to measure performance of the top bureaucracy.
Personnel Management executive performance management division manager, Diki Iorkak Saia, said it was a locally-produced management system that would see if departmental heads were really performing or not against their key performance indicators.
He said the performance would then be uploaded online so that the minister made his final rating based on the key performance indicator signed.
Saia said the only people who could have access to the system were the respective minister, chief secretary and Personnel Management secretary.
He said the information was then forwarded to the ministerial appointment committee for scrutiny for appointment purposes.