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24 November 2008

Programme director
Members of the Media
Colleagues and friends

Thank you for attending our end of year report back on the Turnaround project at Home Affairs. This year,2008, has been our first year of implementing real change after we spent the last half of last year determining a new business model through an exercise called Visioning and Designing. We then entered a phase in the transformation of Home Affairs where we can start showing real, tangible results.

When I announced this turnaround project last year I said that this turnaround was not about superficial tweaks, but about deep and fundamental change. Even at that time, we had frankly acknowledged that the transformation process within the department will not be an overnight quick fix process, and as a result we anticipated that there was going to be certain levels of impatience on the part of some of our clients and the public. This impatience, we have always maintained, is justified.

For this reason, I am very happy that, now, after only a year of implementation, this turnaround project is starting to bear fruit with some of our key services fundamentally re-engineered. We are moulting the old skin of Home Affairs and what is now emerging is a brighter, better, more efficient organisation.

We have designed this work in such a way that its ultimate success will be measured by its ability to resolve the business shortcomings we have, and therefore make a real impact on the experience of our clients on the ground.

Secondly, whilst new systems and re-engineered processes are crucial, the changes at Home Affairs will be driven and sustained only if we have committed skilled people to implement these new processes.

The vision and design process resulted in a new organisational structure for the department, emphasising the need for capacity in areas that drive our core business in line with our new processes.

One of the key elements of the turn around project therefore is to get the right people into the right positions within this new structure. This means attracting skilled new staff into the more than 3000 new positions required by the new Home Affairs model.

But it also means that, as we migrate from the old Home Affairs model to the new one, we take our existing staff with us. We should ensure that people are able to do the jobs they are required to do and that they are placed in positions in terms of to their strengths, skill-level and experience.

Much of this hinges on training and skilling people and in our presentation we will show you some of the things we have already done in this regard, however, last week, during our presentation to Standing Committee on Public Accounts (SCOPA), when we discussed the issue of staffing and skills, the DG referred to the use of competency testing.

I would like to take this opportunity to clarify some issues around this topic, because it is important for us that not only you and the public understand this matter, but that our staff also has the correct understanding too.

The competency tests the Director-General referred to were done in 2006 before we began with the turnaround project and were only done on only 80 of the top level of managers, not the entire organisation of about 7 500 staff members.

The tests were done specifically to identify weaknesses in management and leadership skills and the results of those tests were used to develop training and development programmes essential to addressing the problems seen in the department.

In September and October this year, as part of our restructuring of the department and in line with our stated objective of ensuring that the right people are in the right positions, we repeated the competency tests on the same level of managers and this time 76% of the senior managers passed these tests.

This is a clear indication that the development programmes for staff contained in the turnaround programme are bearing fruit.

I want to make it clear that the competency tests of 2006 that were referred to by the Director-General in the Scopa meeting have no bearing on the current restructuring processes within the department, but those results are very helpful in illustrating the huge battle we were faced with when the Turnaround began a battle I believe we are now starting to win.

Over the next year we will migrate all our staff into the new Home Affairs model which has different structures and therefore some different positions to the old one. Earlier this year we signed a historic agreement with the two unions representing the staff of Home Affairs.

This agreement was ground breaking because in it the unions committed themselves to making the Turnaround work and a very clear roadmap around staff migration was agreed to.

I need to emphasise the point the department of Home Affairs is in more ways than one venturing into uncharted territory as no comprehensive transformation program has ever been implemented at this scale in a normal public service department. We continue to implement this program within the tight regulation of the public service and we shall always seek to adhere to this regulatory framework as provided for through the Public Service Act.

A more detailed presentation on the work of the turnaround Project will now be presented to you.

And on that note, I would like to invite our turnaround Manager, Jacob Mamabolo, to take us through a selection of achievements of the past year.

Thank you.

Enquiries:
Thabo Mokgola
Tel: 012 810 7242
Cell: 082 902 8414
E-mail: thabo.mokgola@dha.gov.za

Issued by: Department of Home Affairs
24 November 2008