THE Government will be using change champions in the public sector to promote service excellence. These are individuals selected within the various ministries, departments and agencies (MDAs) to drive the culture of change within the public service.

Principal director in the Office of the Cabinet, Public Sector Modernisation Division (PSMD) Karlene McKenzie Spencer made the disclosure during an interview with JIS News. She said the change champions will help the MDAs manage the change process, communicate information relating to any change of policy, and serve as the middlemen between mangers and staff to alleviate concerns, by sharing information on the ground.

She said that ministers of Government are seen as some of the main change champions.

The engagement of change champions aligns with the Service Excellence Policy launched by Prime Minister Andrew Holness in July, which outlines key principles and minimum standards for all government entities, as well as the mechanism by which service excellence will be institutionalised in all MDAs.

The goal is to create a culture of service excellence across the public sector that drives the delivery of services that meet and exceed citizens’ expectations.

MDAs are expected to develop and implement their own service excellence programmes in keeping with the policy.

“One of the guideline documents that we are developing is communication and change management. In that document, it will outline the various processes and steps that must be taken to ensure that we do get the change happening in the MDAs,” McKenzie Spencer said.

She added that for every change plan that is going to be implemented, there will be need to develop the change champions.

“I will say that, in the first instance, there is our customer service improvement team, and the head of that is our first line. We have our ministers being our sponsor, we have the chair of the customer service improvement team, which will be working with the various divisions within their entity to get that change happening,” she said.

She added that it is crucial to support the change champions, as the process of changing the culture within the public sector will take time.

“We need to build a body of change agents within our entities for us to be able to deliver the change. The guideline documents would outline all of this for the ministries to enable them to do this implementation. We are providing the guideline documents because we want to create a fair playing ground, where everybody is given the same information for implementation,” McKenzie Spencer said.

— JIS