Sheldine Sehntwali (centre), Senior Training Officer shaking hands with Senator Darcy Boyce (left), Minister in the Prime Minister’s Office as Permanent Secretary in the Training Administration Division, Esworth Reid, looks on.
Create operational plans
The Training Administration Division hosted a workshop aimed towards finding ways to transform the way in which the public sector delivers their services recently at the Lloyd Erskine Sandiford Centre.
Speaking during the opening ceremony of the three-day workshop titled, “High Level Strategic Review and Planning Seminar”, Senator Darcy Boyce encouraged persons present to look at ways in which they could transform the public service with operational plans that could be put in place now.
“Let me also suggest that while you deal with those operational things that we can do now and do them better than we did before, it gives people the inspiration to aim for the bigger and better goals. We have a lot of operational things that we can work on now,” he said.
The Senator went on to note that he believed there needed to be a matter of sharing information between the governmental organisations and making information available for everyone.
“I don’t sense that there is sufficient information among the technical officers and their ministry officers in the public service; and its not only a matter of sharing information but building networks so that people are able to jump in and come to your assistance, everyone is watching everyone’s back and that is the value of networking,” he said.
He challenged the persons present to look at the Government as a whole and look at ways to break down the silos.
Additionally, Senator Boyce believed that persons were responsible for the public sector, the business community and non-governmental organisations to work towards increasing the productivity of the island.
“I would like to have our public service accept that responsibility. It is not to say that you are the only ones responsible for what happens in this country, but there is very little that can happen without your active and positive involvement,” he said.
“We have been featured over the past several years in several international studies which indicate to us that our competitiveness, both in the public sector and business community, it is not what it ought to be.”
Senator Boyce noted that these studies have indicated that they were not performing well as he believed that Barbados needed to work towards maintaining and improve the competitive edge.