Batho Pele

Project Khaedu

The Senior Management Service Delivery Challenge

Project Khaedu is an integral part of the Batho Pele Revitalization strategy. This project came about as a response to the survey conducted by DPSA in 2003 with regard to the extent to which both national and provincial government departments are implementing the Batho Pele Principles. That survey revealed that although some departments are implementing these principles, most departments still regard these as a set of separate principles unrelated to their day to day operations.

As a response to this state of affairs, Cabinet therefore, decided in August 2004 that all SMS members must, during every performance review cycle, be deployed to the coalface of service delivery and that this must be incorporated into their Performance Agreements as one of their Key Performance Areas.

The DPSA has therefore, developed and piloted Project Khaedu as a process to facilitate and ensure successful deployments to the coalface.

The objectives of project khaedu are to:

Equip all SMS members with a basic management tool kit for problem identification, analysis and resolution,
Expose SMS members from all departments to service delivery issues at the coalface, and
Monitor and evaluate the implementation to ensure that the toolkit is understood and used.

These objectives are advanced through:

a 4.5 days on management core skills development programme where participants are exposed to techniques of problem solving based on case studies and practical exercises,
a supervised 5 days deployment to the "coalface" (to practice the skills developed) where participants identify and analyse the service delivery problems and write a short report proposing practical recommendations on how to unblock the blockages to service delivery, and
the Public Service Week to monitor the extent to which the recommendations from the deployment sites are implemented so as to unblock the service delivery logjam.

Participants develop their problem solving and analytical skills in the following areas:

Process Design: Basic introduction to process design concepts such as process mapping, time and value analysis, capacity analysis and best demonstrated practice development. The following three (3) SMS competencies are integrated to this module: client orientation and customer focus, service delivery innovation and problem solving and analysis.
Organisation Effectiveness: Modern organisation structures, teaming concepts, decision making and authority levels, overcoming human capacity bottlenecks and creating a "learning organisation culture". SMS competencies matched to this module are: change management and strategic capacity and leadership.
People Management: this is about the core skills in hiring, performance management, discipline and working with organised labour and understanding the change management issues within the public service context. The SMS competencies linked to this module are change management issues and people management and employment.
Budgets and Controls: This is about how to develop an effective budget, understanding when a unit/component is unable to effectively control expenditure. This is linked to issues of financial management in line with the SMS competency framework.
Communicating for Results: This module revolves on how to present problems and their solutions effectively and is linked to the issue of communication within the SMS competency framework.

Project Khaedu has been successful piloted in the Mpumalanga and KwaZulu Natal provincial administrations. Over 200 managers in the public service have already completed this programme. These SMS members were drawn from those two provinces, Limpopo, North West and selected national departments, namely, SAPS, DPSA, Correctional Services, Home Affairs and the Independent Complaints Directorate.

This programme has been well received by both the participants and the local service delivery institutions and the deployment reports are viewed as useful. It is rate very highly by those SMS members who have participated due to inter alia, its relevance and appropriateness to their day to day work situation, its contents which is based on case studies from both the public sector and parastatals and also due to the fact that the five modules used are linked to the SMS Competency Framework that is developed by the DPSA.

Project Khaedu is one method of addressing issues of leadership and management development because it capacitates managers to develop some of the core management skills required for managing units or components and programme and projects implementation. Managers play a crucial part in policy formulation, which poses problems at the implementation level. The belief here is that if managers are aware of what is happening at the service delivery points, then the knowledge of the challenges will be better reflected in the type of policies crafted in addressing the gaps.