Mr. John Moran:

Essentially, there is a once a year process of sitting down with one's manager and going through a form. We had a difficulty the first year it started. Due to the lack of completion at the beginning, the objectives had not necessarily been set for people. Now we are in the second cycle of where we are going. What should happen is that objectives should be set on an individual basis for all staff and checked by the corporate office and human resources people to ensure they map up with the business planning process and align with the Department's objectives, individual units' deliverables and how individuals contribute to those over the course of the year. To the extent that we identify at the beginning of the year that additional training or help might be useful to complete those objectives or for other reasons of progression, it is noted on the form. The form then crosses to the HR team which builds that into the learning and development plan for the person. There is a mid-year review and at the end of the year there is a genuine series of conversations with people.

What was interesting as a departure in the last series and what worked very well was that there had been some discussion about whether and how one sets the exam equally for people across the entire Department. Inevitably, people are achieving or exceeding objectives. For the system to work well, it is important they feel the same exam standard is set for everyone. To encourage that, we introduced in this round - beginning at senior management level - a Department-wide discussion on all principal officers, cascading down, whereby views were exchanged as to what the relative performances of those people were. We asked those people in turn, who were initially dubious about how the process worked, to do the same thing for the assistant principal officers who were working to them. This year, we have got to a point where people feel a lot more comfortable that this represents a fair assessment. We have had situations where we have identified people as performing less well than their peers and worked with them to improve by obtaining the right skill sets and training.

As I have said, there was a six year period where very little training was done in the Department. Working with that, members will see in our accounts the extra budget funding for training and development now.