Pak Lah wants Ministries to evaluate projects

Pak Lah-Project Evaluation

The Prime Minister today took to task ministries that had lavish project launches but failed to follow up on the progress of the ventures. He urged all ministries to do away with the lavish spending, saying they had become a norm.

Datuk Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi said too much attention was being paid to inviting VIPs to a fanciful launch, usually in a star-rated hotel.

"This is superficial. What matters is the end result of each development project, whether it is successful or not, whether it benefits the people or not. More often than not, there is no follow-up and evaluation after the launch. As a result, certain projects either fail to take off or do not achieve the desired results at all," Pak Lah said.

Stressing the importance of evaluation, Abdullah said "all ministries were required to evaluate each project to ensure that it had achieved its primary objectives and benefited the people. For example, we might have launched a school construction project but seldom we evaluate the project later to ascertain whether students had benefited from it through an improvement in their results. Likewise, we might know how to build government clinics. But there are instances when we do not have enough doctors to attend to the needs of patients. Even if we have enough doctors, we do not have enough equipment."

The statement give rise to many questions:

Is the PM saying that our Minister do not have a project evaluation and performance measurement system including a Monitoring System to capture results and Control Systems which provides direction and actuates corrective and preventive actions?

Oh my God..... We still have ministers who haven't been to school or have left schools and left behind their knowledge....

With this in mind, I wonder how Pak Lah can achieve and implement the Performance Measurement System (PMS) and the Key Performance Indices (KPI) as propagated. How could the PM pronounced so loudly his desire for implementation of PMS and KPIs when ministers don't even evaluate projects, doesn't utilize an evaluation system, monitoring system, and control system? If they had, then....they had failed in their duty to serve the nation and it is GROSS NEGLIGENCE OR IMCONPETENCIES OF THE MINISTERS.

But then,...aren't the ministers selected and appointed by the boss himself????

Doesn't the PM knows whom he had selected to manage? Does it mean he had selected the wrong guys to lead the ministries.... it may sound true with hindsight ... and that's why we had so many failed projects - abandoned wetlands project, abandoned completed schools, bridges cracks and failures, slope failures, improper and lack of guidelines for Bukit Cahaya Agro-forest, dilapidated bridges that killed the kampung people, etc, etc. ...and we have a ministry that have RM7 billion of bad debts from study loan.... is it that we sent so many to universities and none had graduated to serve the government, to set up a monitoring and control system, and generally, to implement system management??????? God help us, please...........