The home affairs department's turnaround project is starting to bear fruit after a year of implementation with some key services fundamentally re-engineered, Minister Nosiviwe Mapisa-Nqakula said on Monday.

"We are moulting the old skin of home affairs and what is now emerging is a brighter, better, more efficient organisation," she told a media briefing.

"We have designed this work in such a way that its ultimate success will be measured by its ability to resolve the business shortcomings we have, and therefore make a real impact on the experience of our clients on the ground."

While new systems and re-engineered processes were crucial, the changes at home affairs would be driven and sustained only if it had committed, skilled people to implement the new processes, she said.

One of the key elements of the turnaround project was to get the right people into the right positions within the new structure.

Attracting new staff

This meant attracting skilled new staff into the more than 3000 new positions required by the new home affairs model.

"But it also means that, as we migrate from the old home affairs model to the new one, we take our existing staff with us.

"We should ensure that people are able to do the jobs they are required to do and that they are placed in positions in terms of their strengths, skill-level and experience," she said.

Much of this hinged on training people.

Referring to reports last week that more than 70 percent of senior managers at home affairs did not have the necessary skills to perform their jobs, Mapisa-Nqakula said these competency tests were done in 2006.

This was before the start of the turnaround project, and were done on only 80 of the top level of managers, not the entire organisation of about 7500 staff members.

The tests were done specifically to identify weaknesses in management and leadership skills and the results of those tests were used to develop training and development programmes essential to addressing the problems seen in the department.

"In September and October this year, as part of our restructuring of the department and in line with our stated objective of ensuring that the right people are in the right positions — we repeated the competency tests on the same level of managers and this time 76 percent of the senior managers passed these tests.

"This is a clear indication that the development programmes for staff contained in the turnaround programme are bearing fruit," she said.

Sapa