A performance improvement program is very relevant in increasing efficiency, productivity, and effectiveness. Wakiso Branch is counting on these odds to better their performance as the branch earlier today launched a new program *“Business Growth Through Strategic, Actionable And Result- Oriented Tactics (BIG-START)”* whose catchphrase is *“TULUMBE Na Lo”* loosely translated; *“let’s attack with zeal”*
With the catchphrase TULUMBE Na Lo, the Wakiso Branch team intended to attack all bottlenecks to business growth such as; No waters, leakages, suppressed accounts, lax staff attitude, arrears, among others with due attention required.
The Branch Manager, Mr. Ronald Kiwanuka acknowledged that the Branch still had a lot of room for business growth.
“We understand that we have a role to play in the contribution to Kampala Water’s achievement of the 32 billion dream and as Wakiso, we believe that this program will focus on new strategies to boost our performance. We are committed to achieving our set targets in the next three months by significantly reducing arrears and suppressed accounts”, stated Mr. Kiwanuka.
The Ag. Commercial Officer, Ms. Agondeze Proscovia made a presentation about the program highlighting its main objective which is to achieve all sales and billing targets thus; 34,039cubic in sales and 158Million in billing.
Other objectives however include but are not limited to; improve water sales from last quota average of 20363 to 34,039 within 6 months, improve billing from last quota average of 99,121,141 to 158,335,759 within 6 months, improve collection efficiency from last quota average of 93.2% to 106% within 6 months, reduce suppressed accounts by 15% from 753 accounts to 642 within 6 months, reduce arrears by 6% monthly from 313,190,007 net arrears as at end of march to 273,560,157 within 6 months, improve new connections from a monthly average of 40 connections to 60 connections within 6 months, and improve response time to leakages and bursts (anomalies) from last quota average 6.4 hours to 2 hours within 6 months.
Prior to officially launching the *BIG-START Program* , the Senior Manager Western Zone, Ms. Hellen Ejang had a word with the staff and encouraged them to embrace teamwork in all that they do. She stated, “It is through working together as a team that you will achieve all your set targets of billing, sales, response rate, collections, reducing arrears, and suppressed accounts.
The scope of the program evaluation criteria stands as; targets on all Key Result Areas will be broken down to daily target level. For instance, revenue collection targets will be broken down to individual daily targets, weekly targets and monthly targets.
There will be daily exit meetings to evaluate target achievement by all staff, and this will be convened by the manager of the week.
Wakiso Branch is taking motivation up a notch and has come up with *Program Rewards.* There shall be individual rewards as well as territory rewards, as follows; Ugx10,000 will be awarded towards achievement of the individual weekly target. Ugx20,000 for achievement of weekly territory target, Ugx50,000 for achievement of monthly territory target, and a certificate of good performance for the best overall evaluated staff at the end of the program.
