Performance Management System (PMS) for Civil Services

• PMS is a tool to integrate goals and operations of the organisation in its various units in a decentralised manner to check the performance of the employees working in the organisation. Hence, they are considered as key in achieving an organisation’s goals.
• The PMS of the private sector is nowhere present in the public sector or government. Hence this is one of the major reasons behind inefficient functioning of government offices and departments.
• This vibrant system of the PMS will help in setting higher organisational goals with efficient management of the available human resource for achieving these set goals and targets. This PMS system will also help promotion of the individuals based on the performance and merit based system will enhance internal healthy competition, which will help in transforming organisation’s efficiency.

Exit Mechanisms: 

• At present, it is rare for a public servant to be fired or punished for incompetence and failure to deliver.
• To bring the necessary competition in administration for improving the efficiency, the PMS need to introduce public service through which appraisal can be done. Compulsory inspection based on the results public servants can be asked to take VRS or can be removed from the office.

Clarity of Purpose and Task:

• There should be distinctions that need to be followed such as the job of policy formulation should be given to the senior public servants and making them free from policy implementation.
• The senior most officers to the government are called secretaries. These secretaries have responsibilities like formation of policy formulation, administrative as well as implementation of the same policies, but sometimes it does not get due recognition. Hence keeping them for the very important function of advising the ministers for policy formulation and this should be enhanced in a more pragmatic way.
• In order to provide Ministers with highquality policy guidance, Secretaries to Government and their supporting staff in the secretariat must not be distracted by regular administrative and organisational responsibilities.
• For this there should be proper division in roles and responsibilities for policy development and implementation. It means ministries should be made responsible to policy guidance, tracking and evaluation of policy compliance along with involvement of the departments for various important tasks such as dept of service delivery, operational matters and enforcement of rules and regulations.
• There is need of broad changes in policy formulations and implementation and also need of restructuring of the various ministries and departments by reduction in hierarchical, even structuring with teambased orientation of the with reduced excessive control with efficiency in operational structure.
• Autonomous executive organisational structures need to be created for carrying out various operational requirements. This is much better and efficient than the regular departmental managed activities and doing away from less flexible operational capacities of the departments of the government. This new team based autonomous organisational structures enhance accountability performance.

A Result Oriented Civil Service: 

• The current system is absolutely dependent on the rule-based approaches.
• There is a preoccupation with the process, adherence to procedures, conformity with budget provisions, and economy of inputs. Consequently, there is undue emphasis on inputs used – how much resources, staff and facilities are made available for a scheme or programme and whether this is in accordance with the standards, rules, and regulations?
• A scheme’s success or failure is often determined by the number of resources consumed. As a consequence, policy has focused on inputs rather than results.
• The input focus of control and accountability has led to a situation where scant attention is paid to the results that are obtained using these inputs, and civil servants are not held accountable for them.
• The objective should be to shift the focus away from such traditional concerns as expenditure and activity levels, towards a management framework that would manage for results by developing robust indicators to assess performance in terms of results by setting key performance indicators.