Rashed Al Qaood, Director General, The National Center for Performance Measurement (Adaa) • Interview
ADAA’s focus is on creating a more focused agency that will help government agencies improve their performance and build their internal capabilities in performance management.
What was your specific mandate upon joining ADAA, and what were your immediate priorities?
When I joined Adaa, I fully reviewed the center’s strategic direction and operations to determine its successes and what needed to be updated from 2016, when the center was established. Part of my mandate was to connect with Adaa’s main stakeholders and identify their needs and challenges. In addition, I reviewed Adaa’s product portfolios and performance reports in order to enhance the government’s performance-based decision making. I also wanted to learn about the measurement of performance from mature governments that have much experience with the process such as the UK, Canada, Australia, Malaysia, Singapore, and the UAE. One of the main performance management takeaways from such benchmarking was that government agencies in mature countries measure their own performances and report them to central government performance agencies. Today, Adaa reports on the performances of government agencies, and we will continue to do so; however, our aim is to enable these agencies to measure their own performances. We also decided Adaa should focus on measuring national priorities and gradually let go of measuring the performances of agencies. One of Adaa’s major new measurements is the national satisfaction index of public services, and the baseline value of this index will be generated, also in 2021. Finally, I must mention our app called Watani. This app allows beneficiaries, including citizens, visitors, and business owners, to evaluate government services. The data collected helps us to evaluate public sector performance from the perspective of beneficiaries. In conclusion, I aim to create a more focused agency, one that helps government agencies to improve their performances and build their internal performance management capabilities.
Did you have to change how you measured organizations and the progress on the vision as a result of the pandemic?
COVID-19 has had several positive effects. Financially, it made us reprioritize our project initiatives at the governmental and organizational levels. At the governmental level, we looked at the vision’s initiatives to reprioritize our work and determine the most important initiatives. As a result of the pandemic, we had to review the government’s affected KPIs. Some were positively affected, such as the massive growth in mobile payments, while others were negatively affected, such as international tourism.
It should be noted that most KPIs related to digitalization and the IT sector did well.
How have digitalization efforts like Watani helped you measure the government response to the virus?
Watani opened a great gate for us to measure beneficiaries’ experiences with public services. As the app’s success depends on a large number of beneficiaries participating in the evaluation of a service, we added a push feature to nudge users into giving us their feedback immediately after using a service. We are also targeting the integration of the Watani app with other successful apps, such as Absher, to obtain more accurate and timely data. Today, we can access many services online; therefore, next year, we plan to give Watani a new dashboard that will integrate with governmental electronic platforms. Our strategy is to evolve our mission and approach. We plan to shift every three years, from now until the end of 2022; then every three years from 2022, we will revise our strategic plan. For the first three years, we will focus on measuring the general performance and contributions of a limited number of major government agencies to the national plans and Vision 2030. We chose these agencies carefully by looking at their budgets, beneficiaries, number of services they offer, and whether they are members of CEDA. At the end of the final year, they will graduate as government agencies and can then measure themselves. This is part of our strategy to ensure that we have a mature performance measurement environment.
BIO
Rashed Al Qaood has over 18 years’ experience in multiple leadership roles in the public sector. Before joining Adaa, he was an advisor to the minister of commerce. Al Qaood has also worked in leadership positions in the Ministry of Labor and Social Development, Crown Prince Private Affairs, Saudi Food and Drug Authority, and King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology. Al Qaood holds a master's degree in software engineering from Prince Sultan University and has attended many executive programs, such as the General Management Program (GMP) at Harvard Business School.