Criteria Workshops Bring Together Teams from Across Five Palestinian Ministries
The Kaizen Company is advancing its Centers of Excellence (COE) program in the West Bank, which is part of the Chemonics-led, USAID Palestinian Authority Capacity Enhancement Program (PACE). Over the past month, the project led five different Criteria Workshops, each one focusing on one of the five pillars of excellence; leadership, people, knowledge, processes and finance.
These Workshops were part of the Centers of Excellence (COE) program, which works directly with ministry counterparts to institutionalize reform within their organizations. COE endeavors to develop an institutional environment where employees are encouraged and supported to identify and pursue opportunities to improve operations.
The participants in the workshops included small teams from the Ministry of Finance (MOF), the Ministry of Transportation (MOT), the Ministry of the Interior (MOI), and the Ministry of Public Works and Housing (MOPWH). Kaizen has been working with these ministries to provide organizational reform support and to promote a culture of excellence within their ministries and to deliver effective reforms that improve the services their organizations provide to Palestinians.
During the workshops, the ministry teams presented their strengths and weaknesses that they had discovered so far during their Organizational Self-Assessment process. By listening to the strengths and weaknesses of the other ministries, ministry teams were motivated to continue developing their self-assessments.
After each presentation, the ministry team was subject to a question and answer session where they answered tough questions and received valuable feedback from their peers from other Ministries. The ministry teams also received valuable advice on how they can address their weaknesses and build on their strengths as individual ministries.
The Criteria Workshop also provided ministry teams the chance to network within their own ministries as well as with participants from other ministries in order to build linkages. In one case, two different participants in the Finance Criteria Workshop found out that they would both be going on the same trip to India to receive finance training.
While the ultimate determinant of success is the number of reform initiatives underway, all of the participating teams seemed to value the workshops and responded that they wish to attend Criteria Workshops in the future in order to support their work towards specific reform goals.
The PACE COE team is looking forward to continuing working with each of the ministries on setting their own priorities to improve the government services that they provide.
