New evaluation criteria for Dubai excellence awards

"Under the directives of General Shaikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Crown Prince of Dubai and UAE Minister of Defence, the programme is committed to developing the excellence criteria to reflect changes in management, quality and excellence, and to meet any future developments in the government sector," a Press release issued here said.

"For this purpose the programme has updated the criteria for all categories of Dubai Government Excellence Awards and drawn out a dynamic and comprehensive model that focuses on transparency and performance results to achieve excellence," Nabil Al Yousuf, Co-ordinator General of the Dubai Government Excellence Programme, was quoted in the Press release as saying.

Ahmed Nusairat, Programme Consultant, Dubai Government Excellence Programme, pointed out that the programme was following an international model of excellence, which would help government departments to compare its procedures and results of its business with distinguished international departments. Although these criteria were international, they had been adapted to the business environment of the UAE and the Arab region as a whole, he added.

The Distinguished Government Department and Distinguished Government Division will be evaluated on the basis of leadership, policy and strategy, personnel, partnership and resources, processes, customer results, people results, society results and key performance results. The Distinguished Team category will be judged based on the business plan of the team, the spirit of cooperation and results.

Distinguished Management Initiative and Distinguished Technical Initiative will be judged on the basis of the initiative idea, application and benefit from the initiative. 'Distinguished Employee' categories will be judged on the performance and achievements, creativity, cooperation, job commitment, responsibility, team spirit, management skills and the ability to learn.

The Excellence Programme has also added an element of transparency to the criteria of evaluating the government departments and management. The Programme Management team has visited 10 government departments to strengthen the communication between various government departments and explain the changes in the criteria. The programme will organise three training workshops next month for Quality Departments in the government sector. The workshop will explain in detail the criteria of the programme and clarify the procedure of evaluation. The Quality Department will explain the procedures to the employees in their respective government sectors.