The draft directive of the Service Delivery Improvement Plans (SDIPs) will see government departments fast tracking quality services to citizens with speed, integrity and excellence.
The SDIPs seek to identify critical (key) services that are poorly performing across sector departments by using various source documents.
The source documents expected to be used by government departments are the Auditor-General’s reports, Frontline Service Delivery/ KHAEDU senior and middle management site deployments reports, Quality Core Standards reports (where applicable), Statistics South Africa (STATSSA) reports, complaints reports and satisfaction survey reports to develop a situational analysis matrix that will inform the departmental critical and poor performance service areas.
Departments should also utilise the Operations Management Framework and its toolkits to identify mandatory services of all sector departments and clusters and to set service standards for each service.
The problem (Cause-&-effect) analysis of these poorly performing services should be specific and should be analysed to an extent of identifying the interventions required that would lead to service delivery improvement.
The SDIPs main aim is to provide a focused approach to continuous improvement of key services and products in line with the Batho Pele principles, which serve to ensure effective and efficient service delivery by putting ‘People First’.
Following the draft directive of the SDIP, departments are required to submit their approved strategic plan inclusive of SDIPs to DPSA and/or publish on respective departmental websites by 31 March every five (5) years.
The year 2020 is a baseline to enable the SDIPs to be integrated into the 5-year strategic plans and annual performance plans of departments.
Departments are also expected to integrate their SDIPs into to their five-year strategic and annual performance plans.
The rationale behind following the assessment process is to ensure that the concerns of the South African citizens are addressed and improved service delivery on a continuous basis is realized.
This Service Delivery Improvement Assessment tool seeks to assist departments to assess themselves or to be assessed by their peer sector or cluster departments in ensuring that they meet the set minimum quality requirements that should be followed when developing the SDIP.
The intention is to ensure that credible, realistic, effective and Specific Measurable Achievable Realistic and Time-bound (SMART) SDIPs are developed for implementation, reporting on progress made and the evaluation of impact.
Government departments will also have to ensure that SDIPs meet the requirements of the Constitution, Promotion of Administrative Justice Act (PAJA) as well as Promotion of Access to Information Act (PAIA).
Departments will also ensure that executive management drives their respective SDIPs development process.
We expect departments to develop SDIP Action Plans, a Service Delivery Model that will respond to the citizen’s concerns through cross-cutting team’s representative of all spheres of government, all functional units within departments and citizen’s representative structures with the view of solving the identified problematic areas.
The focus of the six administration is that departments will have to ensure that the problem analysis of each identified service area addresses the root-cause, effect, strategies and interventions that shall be put in place over a 5-year period to ensure that service delivery improvement takes place as aligned with the strategic planning and annual performance planning framework.
The monitoring and reporting on the implementation of SDIPs will be integrated and aligned to the strategic and annual performance planning.
Frontline cluster or sector-focused deployment of Senior Management Service (SMS) and Middle Management Service (MMS) members on SDIP implementation is expected to be monitored on an annual basis.
As part of the evaluation process of the SDIPs, DPSA in partnership with the Department of Planning, Monitoring and Evaluation (DPME) will conduct the evaluation of the implementation of all submitted SDIPs.
The SDIPs submitted to DPSA are currently for the 2018/21 SDIP cycle, while the new administrative five-year cycle will commence on 1 April 2020.