Strategic Action Plan - International Environmental Technology Centre

Strategic Action Plan Report
Table 9.1: The owner and use of KPI
Who?
How?
Municipal Dept. responsible for delivery to judge its own performance
of Service
to evaluate strategies
to institute new processes
Superior Officers
to judge effectiveness of staff
to make decisions regarding promotions and
rewards
Elected Body of Representatives to judge performance of the administration
to create policy that will aid in the delivery of
performance
to take action (reward or punitive) against
administrative officials
Citizens
to judge performance of dept
to recommend/push for policy and/or staff
Budgeting Agencies (internal or external)
changes
to decide allocation of funds to help improve
performance
to reward performing implementers
A KPI is only worth the quality of the data that is used to evaluate it. It is important to define the
methodology that will be used to collect the data needed for every KPI. This includes
• Data should be at the most granular (disaggregated) level. This will allow for analysis of the data in a
way that is most suitable.
• The exact formats in which data will be gathered and the person/s responsible for recording the data
should be specified
• Existing systems for gathering data should be evaluated. They may be adequate, may need to be
enhanced or changed or a complete new system may have to be put in place.
Given the general lack of systems in a typical Municipality, it will take time for the data gathered by it to
be reliable and for it to be trusted by the public at large. Both as a confidence building measure as well as
a way for the Municipality to further pull its own systems to improve the data quality, an independent
effort must be undertaken by citizen groups to check the data presented by the Municipality. This can be
done in a few ways
• check the consistency of the data
• do spot checks or sampling of the data
• undertake a survey that covers a certain geographical area or time period
The manner in which these are done should be shared with the Municipality so that the validity of these
independent corroboration efforts is recognized by it. The results of the independent assessment and the
Municipal data should not differ from one another by an unreasonable amount – determined by whether
public confidence in the official data is undermined.
In the end the focus of the public audit should be the improvement of the services, not a debate about
the validity of the data itself. It is expected that with time, not only will the services improve, but also the
reliability of the official data improves.
9.2 Illustrative Key Performance Indicators
Table 9.2 shows a list of the various types of KPIs along with the output that is being measured 2 .
2 As referred to http://www.capetown.gov.za/iwmp/sept2004/section3keperformanceindicators.pdf
ISWM Plan for Pune 217