A public sector management specialist is giving the Mia Mottley-led administration the thumbs up for making provisions for public servants to answer questions during debate on the Estimates of Revenue and Expenditure.
The change, which saw permanent secretaries, heads of departments and leaders of a number of agencies appearing before Parliament last week to account for programmes and initiatives, has received mixed reaction.
Some residents contended that it was a useless exercise.
However, senior lecturer in public sector management at the University of the West Indies, Cave Hill Campus, Dr Wayne Charles-Soverall, told Barbados TODAY the decision to have senior management account for their stewardship was “spot on”, since it provided a greater level of accountability and transparency.
Dr Charles-Soverall, who has worked in varying positions in the public sector over 20 years, said it was something he had advocated, since things were previously done in silos without any real public performance oversight.
“It’s a very good idea because it has all the elements of accountability and transparency, which really ought to be there. There’s a system in the public service called the PRDS [Performance Review and Development System], which is really supposed to capture all of this, because it starts with a strategic plan that all ministries and departments have and that plan should really be linked to the budget process,” he said.
“That should then be linked to performance, which would mean that each ministry should know what it wants to do for the given year, how many programmes and projects they’re going to have. Your Estimates or Budget should be an attempt to get enough funds to undertake all these programmes, projects and activities.”
The senior lecturer compared the situation to International Monetary Fund (IMF) oversight of the Government’s implementation of the Barbados Economic Recovery and Transformation (BERT) programme.
“The IMF team was here to measure the Government’s performance. We’ve said you must measure performance; if you’re not measuring performance, then you don’t know if you’re on target or off target. I believe the Prime Minister is logically extending that downward and saying ‘let’s see if we can be transparent and accountable because at the end of the day performance matters’,” the lecturer said.
Dr Charles-Soverall has published a number of books on productivity, his most recent is entitled Empowering Management.
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