FCTA sustains implementation of standard operating procedures

In order to implement and sustain ongoing reforms to ensure efficient service delivery, the Federal Capital Territory Administration (FCTA), has organised a 5-day Standard Operating Procedures (SOP) training programme for its staff of all grade levels and across Secretariats, Departments and Agencies (SDA’s) of the Territory.

In particular, 50 staff were exposed to intensive drilling on knowledge and operating skills about the SOP and its implementation in the FCTA, to help tackle redundancy and bureaucratic bottlenecks in the system, thereby improving performance and service delivery.

Speaking at a brief closing ceremony, Director, FCTA Human Resources, Mallam Mohammed Bashir, said the training aimed at boosting the capacity of the participants, which cut across all the FCTA SDAs, irrespective of grade levels, to change their psyche and mode of operation.

Bashir said: “That’s the psyche of the head of civil service of the federation- to change the entire system of the civil service from analogue to digital. So we want to see changes because this SOP system that adopted is what is going to move the civil service to the higher level of service delivery.

“To enhance good service delivery in FCT, we have given to each and every SDAs the opportunity to train their staff, and with the 40% of such domiciled in human resources, with consent of the Permanent Secretary, we are going to sustain this training.”

He added: “We are now set to go, as you are trained today, you will be the ones to train others. Our vision is for you to be reasonable civil servants that would be different to our mandate given to us by the FCTA, which I believe will be able to achieve based on the new initiative that we have acquired, by so doing you are going to domesticate it wherever you are, apart from being facilitators of SOP training

“Going back to your various places (SDAs), it is expected that your mode of operation will improve the service delivery in the FCT,” he stated.

Also speaking, Director, Reforms Coordination and Service Improvement Department (RC&SID), Dr Jumai Ahmadu, said so far, only 2 per cent of the entire FCTA SDAs have been exposed to the SOP training programme, which makes a heavy burden on the SOP-trained staff.

Ahmadu recalled that sometimes in June, the FCTA deployed SOP to enable improvement of performance and ensure that the staff know what they are supposed to do in the system, which in the process it was realised that there is the need to have the in-house resource, to enable the Administration effectively cascade it down to all SDAs.

“We have over 50 departments in the FCTA, so what we just witnessed was training of our 50 SOP champions that would be the resource that we are going to use to deploy to other departments, and it would cost us less money to teach others in the system on how to develop their SOPs”, she stressed.

On the sustainability of the SOP training, she said: “We are going to identify others, just like we identified the 50 trainees from the over 300 that were trained in May, we are going to have more, as the exercise unfolds, because we want to have a crop of people in the system that we can always draw from, to train others, to ensure that there is the constant building of capacity in the system.”

Similarly, Chief Admin Officer, RC&SID, which is the SOP Facilitating arm of the FCTA, Fatai Aremu Bello, said the trained staff are expected to exhibit exemplary attitudinal change in the system.

Not left out, Dorothy Adoga, a participant from the FCT Economic Planning, Revenue Generation and Public Private Partnership Secretariat

According to her: “The SOP training is going to help us design our planned action and execute all our activities so that we can be able to drive the process, and at the end of it, we will have efficient service delivery. The digital aspect of the programme will be effectively deplored and fully implemented towards achieving our mandate in the system.”

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