Who is SALGA?
The South African Local Government Association (SALGA) is a member-based association that acts as a unifying body that represents the interests of the diverse range of local government authorities in South Africa. SALGA serves as a collective voice for municipalities, advocating for their needs and priorities at the national and provincial levels of government.
All 257 municipalities in the country are members of SALGA, including metropolitan, district and local municipalities
SALGA’s main purpose is to promote, strengthen and advance the interests of local government by supporting and advising municipalities to fulfil their mandate – the delivery of basic services – electricity, water, sanitation – effectively and efficiently to all citizens to fester societal well-being.
- SALGA’s Mandate is to transform Local Government to enable it to fulfill its developmental mandate:
- Lobby, advocate, protect and represent the interest of Local Government at relevant structures and platforms.
- Act as an employer body representing all municipal members and by agreement, associate members.
- Build municipal institutional capacity, as well as the leadership and technical capacity of Councillors and officials.
- Support and advise members on a range of issues to assist them with effective execution of their mandate.
- Build the profile and image of Local Government within South Africa and outside the country.
- Serve as a custodian of Local Government intelligence and the Knowedge Hub for the sector.
The Challenge
SALGA experienced issues in 3 distinct areas:
Annual Performance Plan:
The required quarterly performance reporting against the APP targets was a manual process based on Excel templates with quality and timing issues and problems in version control. Reports and analytics for the various stakeholders were created manually.
Project Portfolio Management:
The actual implementation of the APP via projects was done in a siloed approach with little visibility and customer (i.e. municipality) focus.
Enterprise Risk Management:
The quarterly monitoring of risk and the implementation status of the risk mitigation actions as well as the quarterly reporting to the Audit and Risk Committee was a very laborious manual process.
The Solution
Using the Scientrix strategy management software, SALGA now has a holistic and transparent overview of their quarterly Performance-, Project implementation- and Risk-status and could improve the reporting quality and speed with a significantly reduced manual effort.
Transparent Real-time Progress tracking
The Scientrix platform provides SALGA Senior Management with a single window of coordination for the APP, Project Portfolio and Risk-Management process all managed in one platform instead of disparate single-purpose tools.
Management decided to provide read-access to all SALGA staff thus ensuring that all employees are on the same page regarding the SALGA strategy and progress to target for each area. Using the Scientrix dependency feature SALGA can now link all their targets back to their clients (municipalities) which helps with prioritization and creation of real impact.
Customized Reporting
Leveraging its integration capabilities and working with the SALGA team, the Scientrix team was able to configure the required quarterly and ad-hoc reports from the data captured in the Scientrix platform.
The reports work on a periodic or on a self-service basis and are available in PDF, Word and Excel format as required by the various stakeholders. The reports are distributed via customizable email distribution lists to the relevant recipients.
Better Collaboration
With all staff working in the same system platform instead of separate Excel templates, team members can now see implementation progress of activities and projects beyond their traditional departmental boundaries and self-adjust their work in case of dependencies.
Using the Scientrix platform, team members can now immediately report on activities completed / targets achieved as and when that happens and do not need to wait until the end of the quarter when reporting templates and reporting due dates are received and reporting effort is peaking through weekends.. This contributes to a more balanced workload for the reporting teams.
Conclusion
The Scientrix platform and the experienced implementation team together with the relevant SALGA stakeholders created a fit-for-purpose solution for institutional reporting, project portfolio management and enterprise risk management at SALGA using one single window of coordination.