Results-Based Performance Management in the Philippines

Written by Cristina Mihăiloaie on July 30, 2019. Posted in Articles, Balanced Scorecard

The Result-Based Performance Management System in Philippines – RBPMS for short, is an initiative that promotes efficient governance for national government agencies and employees.

This initiative monitors the performance of government agencies, ensuring they are in line with the Aquino Administration’s commitment to good governance, by encouraging excellence performance management and high quality public services.

The RBPMS is supported by an online platform, dedicated to maintaining a high degree of transparency regarding the performance of government agencies and clear channels of communication with the general populace on the same topic. The Inter-Agency Task Force on the Harmonization of National Government Performance Monitoring, Information and Reporting Systems, otherwise known as AO25 IATF, is the governing body managing this endeavour.

To achieve government excellence, the Philippines has become more interested in performance management best practices and sought the right instruments and techniques to create a feasible performance management framework.

Promoting performance transparency on the RBPMS website, the general public can access performance data for each agency, which is clustered in three sections: compliance status, performance scorecards and MFO accountability report cards.

The compliance status refers to respecting specific regulations, based on a series of criteria such as:

• Departmental Performance Accomplishment Report

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• Priority Programs / Project Accomplishment Report

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• Good Governance Conditions

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• Public Financial Management Report

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• Agency Procurement Compliance and Performance

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• Posting of Operations Manual or ISO Certification

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• Posting of Guidelines on Rating and Ranking

Oftentimes, governments promote the idea of good governance among their agencies, but they are not always successful in specifically defining what good governance actually means. In this particular case, good governance is about:

• Maintenance / update of the Agency Transparency Seal – refers to having clearly stated on the official email the following type of information:

1. Agency’s mandated and functions, officials and contact information;

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2. Statements of Allotments and Obligations;

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3. Financial accountability reports;

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4. Approved budgets and targets;

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5. Major programs and projects clustered on the 5 key national strategic results areas. Program / project beneficiaries identified;

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6. Status of program / project implementation;

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7. Annual procurement plan, contracts awarded and name of contractors.

Performance scorecards offer us information about the progress made in implementing strategic projects, as is shown in the example below.

In terms of tourism, major KPIs tracked are # International visitors, $ Inbound receipts, $ Total revenue collected, # Technical assistance, # Accreditation applications acted upon, # Park visitors. However, it should be kept in mind that these examples of KPIs are fashioned for the Philippines National Tourism Development Plan.

The rating section of the scorecard indicates the extent to which the target has been achieved and contributes to calculating an overall performance score for each agency, based on which these become eligible for performance bonuses that get cascaded even further at the team and individual level.

Data regarding this endeavor can be traced back to as early as 2012, with information being available for the following two years, 2013 and 2014 respectively.

The MFO accountability report cards provide more insight on the scorecard data. For each division, performance gets broken down to more specific KPIs. For example:

Technical Advisory Services:

• # Technical assistance/advisories provide to stakeholders;
• # Trained employees in tourism industry;
• # Training days delivered;
• % Entities that rate the technical service as satisfactory or better;
• % Entities requests for assistance responded to within 1 week.

Modern times have reshaped not only the way companies do business, but also how government practices and performance management efforts are transcending the boundaries, with private sector policies gaining more popularity and seeing greater applicability for public services.

Image sources:

• Freerangestock
• Pixabay
• Development Academy of the Philippines (2016), The Result-Based Performance Management System

Tags: Government performance, KPI, Performance in Philippines, Scorecard