Fate of 13,000 project offices workers still undecided

The Addis Ababa City Administration which is in the final stages of restructuring its human resources based on its new Business Process Reengineering (BPR), still undecided if they will keep project office workers.
They have been working in various Kaizen, environmental and planning project offices. Recently, the City Vice Mayor announced that a majority of the projects would merge into existing institutions.
A source in the administration told Capital that the city cabinet would hold a meeting to decide the worker’s fate.
“Most of the project office workers where hired on a contract basis so if they are suited for the new structure they can continue but if not we will let them go. The cabinet will offer recommendations in a few weeks.”
The sources added that the BPR study on teachers and health workers will soon be launched.
BPR was targeted after the restructuring which streamlined 117 institutions to 68.
Currently the administration has 109,000 workers. BPR will give them a new job based on their educational status and work experience.
For the last four months the city has implemented a hiring freeze. According to the source new jobs will be posted after the BPR is implemented in the administration.
Seven years ago, Mayor Kuama Demeksa introduced BPR and restructured the jobs of city workers.
Since 1994, the government of Ethiopia has embarked on reforming its civil service organizations with the objective of improving the public sector service delivery system. The government sponsored a lot of management training programs to enhance the capacities of civil service employees and to implement Result Based Performance Management System in all of its civil service organizations. Though this brought some improvements in the performance of some civil service organizations, the effort required was too much as compared to the benefits obtained. Since 2004, the government has also endorsed Business Process Reengineering (BPR) as a foundation for strengthening Result Based Performance Management System in the Civil Service. Scientific Management, Systems Theory and Operations Management are the theoretical and methodological foundations of BPR. For this reason, most corporations used BPR as transformation tool during the 1980s and 1990s. However, the characteristics of government organizations are different from corporate organizations. These distinguishing features constrain government organizations from emulating the BPR experiences of corporate ones.