By Dr Tafataona Mahoso

IN 2014, the Government of Zimbabwe adopted the Integrated Result-based Management (IRBM) policy and ordered that all Government departments and public entities adopt it and work towards its implementation.
Ministries and public entities, alike, identified IRBM focus persons who were taken to a two-week long workshop in Nyanga to prepare for the training of all senior personnel in their respective ministries and public entities.
Looking back, the policy does not appear to have produced the desired results and there are many reasons this may be the case:
– First, the IRBM programme was adopted in its entirety instead of selecting modules which seemed most suitable for particular sectors or emphasising modules which could yield quick results in particular entities or areas such as infrastructure projects.
– Second, the civil service bureaucracy was given authority over the training of personnel from public entities and the subsequent adoption and implementation of IRBM in those entities.
– This meant that the programme fell victim to what, in the public sector, is called the ‘head-office’ syndrome. This refers to the problem or perception created by officials from the ‘head-office’ who, when they go out to the provinces and districts, tend to assume that they have power over the latter and they can tell even persons senior to them what to do by virtue of their coming from ‘the head-office.’ Even clerks from ‘head-office’ end up trying to order senior local officers around, merely because the latter are not from the ‘head-office’.
– Third, the ‘head-office’ syndrome was further compounded when the IRBM policy and its training programme and implementation were removed from the Civil Service Commission (CSC) to the Office of the President and Cabinet (OPC).
– Fourth, right from the beginning, the trainers adopted the most tedious methodology for teaching IRBM, trying to cascade one plan from the levels of the board and the CEO all the way to operators, clerks and sweepers. The comprehensive cascading of one plan could be tolerated only if the elaborate permutations were worked out using appropriate software. But no software was adopted. This meant that the training took much too long to complete.
– In the fifth place, the trainers by now should have developed and produced a comprehensive glossary of IRBM terms and concepts instead of expecting trainees to memorise such terms and concepts.
– In the sixth place, the trainers did not go out of their way to collect the responses of user departments or entities on IRBM. The ‘head-office’ effect also meant that complaints from users were neither systematically collected nor passed on to the authorities in time.
– Last, bureaucrats seemed not to be bothered by the need to consider value for time, let alone value for money for IRBM training sessions.
The decision to adopt the whole IRBM system instead of selecting suitable modules meant that, even when and where an entity successfully carried out the required training, its success would lead to serious problems. This was because implementing the elaborate plan — quarter-by quarter and year-by-year — would involve too much paper work and too much time borrowed from actual productive work. In organisations with significant movement (turnover) of staff, IRBM training would have to start all over again, as soon as there was a significant number of new recruits. The elaborate system would be hard to pass on from incumbents to new recruits without repeating the comprehensive training.
The recently gazetted Public Entities Corporate Governance Act, Chapter 10:31 seems to concede that the 2014 policy of imposing one IRBM system on all departments and public entities was a mistake. Sections 22 and 23 of this new Act seem to give the Board of each public entity the leeway to determine the sort of strategic plan appropriate for the entity. The new Act does not prescribe IRBM as the only format to be followed. But the trainers are ignoring this fact and continuing to make user departments and entities believe that only one strategic planning system, IRBM, is accepted.
The Government’s IRBM policy and programme, since 2014, worsened bureaucratic problems. The Public Entities Corporate Governance Act seems to have abandoned the idea of imposing only one IRBM planning system and methodology; but even this new Act is still likely to worsen bureaucratic problems.
Many management experts think that bureaucracy is needed as a compensation for lack of discipline and lack of competence. In organisations plagued by low levels of competence and high levels of indiscipline, a tightly controlled bureaucratic order seems to be the only solution. But it perpetuates high wastage and low productivity. Bureaucracy tends to stifle excellence and innovation.
There is need for the so-called parastatals reform project to focus on two values which would make tight bureaucracy less important. These two values are competence and discipline.
How can we organise our training, our work place and work force to maximise competence, excellence and discipline?
Highly competent workers tend to be so proud of their performance as to require little supervision. That leads to increased levels of self-discipline which reduces levels of corruption.
Jim Collins, in Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap…and others Don’t, writes:
“Most companies build their bureaucratic rules to manage the small percentage of wrong people on the bus, which in turn drives away the right people from the bus, which increases the need for more bureaucracy to compensate for incompetence and lack of discipline, which then further drives the right people away, and so forth…?”
Since 1987, Dr Mahoso has worked in the public sector in many capacities at executive level. He writes in his personal capacity