PN 743: Technical Support to the Western Cape Department of Economic Development & Tourism

Government Infrastructure Maintenance Study (GMIS)

Presentation to eThekwini5 July 2017

PRESENTED BY:

Shirley Robinson

DATE:

05 | 07 | 2017

Investing in Infrastructure Maintenance

Investment in new & existing infrastructure critical to economic

competitiveness & development

Infrastructure as an ‘Enabler’

Way in which infrastructure is planned, provided, used, maintained,

& even disposed of enables socio-economic development

Improves spatial planning, access to services & economic

opportunities

Reduces economic costs & facilitates productivity

Emphasis is on constructing new infrastructure, but also need to

maintain old & newly built infrastructure, & upgrade or replace worn

out or obsolete infrastructure.

NB that Infrastructure Delivery embraces Life Cycle approach from

asset design & construction through to operation & maintenance, and

thereafter disposal

Infrastructure Delivery Life Cycle Approach

PLAN & DEVELOP

CREATE OR

ACQUIRE

OPERATE &

MAINTAIN

REFURBISHOR

ENCHANCE

DISPOSEOR

UPGRADE INFORMATION MANAGEMENT

SYSTEM&

PROCUREMENT

Collect & update:•Asset register•Technical & operational documents•Maintenance budgets & strategy•Guarantees and/or warranties

DISPOSE OF IA

•Med. To long term maintenance plans•Upgrade or refurbish facilities•Applications for special funds

•Disposal of or removal of asset from original requirement or use•Upgrade to new requirement & extend asset life cycle use

Acquire Or Create Via:•Development•Purchase•PPP Deal•S & LB Deal•Lease•Upgrade

Policy, Standards & Strategy

Inadequate Maintenance – Why?

Public infrastructure maintenance mostly unplanned emergency

maintenance, hardly any scheduled/ planned maintenance

Inadequate budgeting for maintenance

National infrastructure conditional grants for new infrastructure

Maintenance is municipal spending responsibility

Given other municipal priorities (particularly salaries & wages), budgetary

allocation for maintenance low

Technical skills shortage in municipalities (specifically qualified artisans

required for supervisory & mentoring artisan trainees)

Specific competencies required by municipalities are not trained in FET

colleges

Trade tests are not developed yet for scarce skills in municipalities

Result – Negative Impact on Service Delivery!

Review of Municipal Infrastructure Funding

Widening gap between national ring-fenced infrastructure conditional

grant allocations and municipal infrastructure maintenance funding

NT leading continues to lead consultations on the review of local

government infrastructure grants.

Reforms will focus on:

Improving asset management incentives,

Strengthening rules for the use of grant funds for refurbishment;

&

Enhancing oversight by national departments

Skills & Artisan Development

NSDS III guides skills development, policy change from NSDS II

to NSDS III had major impact on funding:

Mandatory grants were reduced from 50% to 20%;

PIVOTAL grant introduced to finance skills development :

Professional, vocational, technical & academic

Programmes which provide a full occupationally

directed qualification

Bridge the gap between learning in college or

university and on the job learning in the workplace

All training which leads to employment – including

apprenticeships

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NSDS III Levy/Grant Breakdown

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PIVOTAL* = Professional, vocational, technical & academic LearningSee CHIETA presentation 2011: 2011/12 DISCRETIONARY GRANT (DG)

Company Skills Development

Levy Contribution

National Skills Fund (NSF)

SETA Administration

Discretionary Grant

Mandatory Grant

PIVOTAL * Grant

Managed by government (DHET) to fund national skills development priorities. (a.k.a. ‘catalytic’ fund)

Ring-fenced to fund the operations of the Seta

Aimed to sponsor organisations’ SD interventions that are in line with the sector scarce and critical skills needs

Refunded to companies upon submission of an ATR/WSP application that is approved by the SETA

Bridging programme to achieve an occupational qualification

Why the GIMS?

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FET College graduates with limited work

experience

Dilapidated public infrastructure due to lack of maintenance

How can these elements be brought

together?

Key findings FET Colleges

FET Colleges offer more generic skills – hardly accompanied by practical experience;

Challenges to place students for practical work experience;

Students not adequately prepared to interact in working environment (work readiness);

National Certificate Vocational (NCV) not acknowledged in public & private sector;

Interaction between colleges & municipalities rare;

Colleges offer what is required in their respective region

Key findings Municipalities

Strategic HRD and planning is limited

Best Practice: CoCT Electricity

Municipalities focus on training and up-skilling of existing staff

Significant numbers of maintenance staff undertaking artisanal work but not formally qualified as artisans

Not all unqualified artisans keen to qualify (outside regulatory trades)

Skills and competency needs in municipalities are very specific;

Infrastructure investment does not relate to increase in personnel

Shortage of staff in critical positions;

Lack of mentors to guide graduates;

1 mentor on qualified artisan level is required to oversee 2 graduates

Key findings and observations

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Key findings and observations

The readiness of municipalities to take on learners and graduates from colleges is not adequate yet;

The readiness of FET Colleges to prepare learners and graduates for placement in municipalities and SOEs is equally not adequate (in terms of skill and competency set as well as in terms of attitude and aptitude);

The current placement programmes are important but don’t have the necessary impact

Quantity before quality?

Tracking system required (ito those agencies that facilitate placement as well as for FET Colleges) in order to identify impact of programme.

The intake of interns/graduates is highly linked to availability of funds provided by government and not so much by the need;

Partnerships between the FET Colleges and other public (and private) sector organisations is not optimally functioning 10

City of Cape Town Case Study

Led strategically through the City IDP

Strategic Area 1: Opportunity City – to create an economically

enabling environment in which investment can grow and jobs can be

created

Investing in new and maintaining existing economic & social

infrastructure

Prioritised investment in expansion & maintenance of key utility

infrastructure – electricity, water & sanitation, solid waste, public

transport – to underpin City’s infrastructure-led growth

Focus on investing in bulk infrastructure delivery according to life

cycle asset management so preventative maintenance and timely

upgrades will optimise maintenance spend & reduce service failures

Recognises that focus on infrastructure maintenance requires

increase in technical skills & capacity

Maximise use of SETAs, EPWP & rolling out extensive

apprenticeship programme to Electricity, Water & Sanitation, Solid

Waste, & Roads

City of Cape Town Case Study

Mayoral Apprenticeship Programme intends to expand and

deepen the City’s current programmes,:

200 apprentices will be trained a year;

New apprenticeship programme that will see the CoCT partnering

with FET colleges to provide 50 bursaries for the practical aspects or

work integrated learning components.

External bursaries that will see the CoCT provide 60 bursaries a

year, expanding to 80 once apprenticeship bursaries are included,

and in later years to 110 bursaries.

In-service training of students requiring work-based experience to

graduate. The CoCT initially provided 450 work-based experience

opportunities before expanding to 600 opportunities over the next

few years.

Graduate internships within the City are limited to engineering and

environment.

CoCT’s partnership with the EPWP

City of Cape Town Case Study: Electricity

Following NERSA 2006 technical audit CoCT Electricity Services

department (CCTES) initiated a multi-year programme to

implement an enterprise asset management system using the

CoCT’s SAP information & technology software platform.

CoCT operates a city-wide SAP-based enterprise resource

planning (ERP) system, which is considered one of the largest

SAP implementations in local government, as it is used for the

entire CoCT back office including logistics, human resources,

finance, and now asset management.

In 2007 ESS contracted Pragma Africa to establish an asset care

centre (ACC) using the CoCT’s SAP software information

technology platform, rather than Pragma’s On Key enterprise

asset management system.

Involved assessing the ESS’s asset management maturity and

developing an asset management improvement programme,

driven through the Pragma asset care centre.

City of Cape Town Case Study: Electricity

ESS contracted Pragma to run an asset care centre at ESS

premises, whereby 6 Pragma resources (engineers, planners,

schedulers and data administrators) are dedicated to ESS and

integrated into ESS’s structures and processes.

Prior to implementing the asset care centre, ESS’s operational

challenges included inadequate control on work requirements

and queuing processes; long lead times; no sequencing or

monitoring & tracking; an underutilised SAP system; and no

feedback.

Division also faced considerable staffing shortages given a 40

per cent increase in work load due to restructuring; lack of

remuneration incentives for increased responsibilities given

increased work load; low morale among staff; and no additional

budgetary allocations.

City of Cape Town Case Study: Electricity

The asset care centre has addressed these challenges by

focusing on 5 key performance areas – information management;

contractor management; project management; work planning &

control; and performance management aligned to focused

interventions for improvement – creating a top 100 job priority list

Required that the CCTES implement a medium to longer term

strategic approach to its human resource and staffing plans.

Constrained shortage of technical skills as well as by the legacy

of ten years of attrition across the CoCT that targeted a reduction

in the City’s overall staffing numbers.

Broad application of the City’s attrition policy saw a slow decline

in staffing numbers wherever vacancies occurred. The

unintended consequence of the blanket approach saw staffing

numbers decline in key technical areas, including within the

CCTES, given greater competition for these skills in the external

market.

City of Cape Town Case Study: Electricity

Due to the technical and regulatory nature of CCTES’s core

business and with a long term view to planning for future

technology applications such as smart and green technologies,

training and skills development now forms a key priority for the

CCTES’s strategic human resourcing plans in support of EAM

implementation.

Funded as a separate cost unit within CCTES departmental

budget, training and skills development is considered a critical

intervention for the CCTES to fill its organisational structure in

support of its service delivery targets.

CCTES has an internal and an external training stream. Internal

training is focused primarily on training existing unqualified

CCTES permanent employees. As internal trainees are full time

CCTES staff, line managers have first call on their productive

time and services, with training based on the operational

requirements of line managers.

City of Cape Town Case Study: Electricity

Starting at NQF level 1 and continuing to completion of a trade

test over four to five years, the CCTES learnership programme

has achieved considerable success with an 85 per cent

throughput rate that has seen 38 candidates completing their

trade test in 2012 and a further 7 in 2013.

The CCTES also implements its own recognition of prior learning

(RPL) programmes for electrical technicians that are required to

be proficient in other trades. The training is outsourced to private

providers (such as DCM) as well as public FET colleges (such as

Northlink).

The CCTES also has a category for special workmen that

engage in similar work to an artisan, learning the trade through

experience and modular training with the CCTES in order to

assist them to prepare for and undertake the relevant trade test

and qualify as an artisan. RPL programmes are all competency

based drawing on a display of skill and assessment using a

portfolio of evidence that is submitted to the relevant SETA for

approval.

City of Cape Town Case Study: Electricity

CCTES external training targets two distinct tracks –

apprenticeships and graduates – that target strategic technical

and engineering areas.

Reintroduced in 2008 as a 2-year programme, the CCTES

accelerated apprenticeship programme is run internally at the

Maitland Training Facility, focusing on electrical engineering (at

NQF levels 1 to 5 and at the different voltage levels – low

voltage, medium voltage and high voltage).

The programme recruits externally, advertising in local

newspapers for electrical apprentices with a minimum of a Grade

12 pass in mathematics and science or a NATED N3 or NCV 4

with relevant trade subjects.

City of Cape Town Case Study: Electricity

Targets further specialised electrical training that enables

candidates to qualify as specialised high voltage or medium

voltage electricians or distribution network operators.

Programme has trained just short of 300 specialised electricians,

all of whom were absorbed into the CCTES.

Programme’s expansion has increased the CCTES’s mentoring

requirements given that apprentices have to be supervised by

qualified electricians on a 2:1

CCTES has also sponsored 134 managers and supervisors on

the Cape Peninsular University of Technology (CPUT)’s

mentorship programme.

Key Message is that CCTES views training as a long term

investment for the division that over time yields a committed

and productive workforce

Proposed Elements of GIMP Toolkit

GIMP task team set up under PSF focused on developing a GIMP toolkit where

the Proposed Elements of GIMP Toolkit

Development of a maturity /progression model to determine the state of

readiness and support required in FET Colleges and the municipalities

Documenting and sharing Best Practice Models (CoCT Electricity model)

Include seconding project managers from local municipalities into best

practice teams to learn and then take back to apply in LM

Recognition of Prior Learning focused on qualifying the bulk of unqualified

artisans currently employed within municipalities

Mentoring programme directed towards Senior or Supervisory Artisans in

Municipalities

Upscaling Work readiness programmes within FETs & municipalities

FETs to provide specific municipal skill related courses/ modules as

additional inserts to NCV (e.g. bulk water reticulation etc)20

GTAC

Government Technical Advisory Centre

Private Bag X115

Pretoria 0001

GTAC

Government Technical Advisory Centre

240 Madiba Street

Pretoria 0002

info@gtac.gov.za

www.gtac.gov.za