Abuan, V. C. (2012). Delivering a quality frontline service in the issuance of special civil registry documents: Focus on centralized annotations infrastructure (Unpublished master's thesis). Public Management Development Program, Development Academy of the Philippines.

Public Management Development Program Middle Managers' Class Thesis (MMC)--Development Academy of the Philippines.

Special civil registry documents are birth, marriage and death certificates that undergo an annotation process because of a court order or decision arising from legal or administrative proceedings. The National Statistics Office (NSO) carries out the annotation and issues the annotated certificates as a service to the public. The volume of requests for this service currently averages 1,600 per day. The annotation process is tedious and cumbersome, suffering from long turnaround times, consequent delayed release of documents, and high incidence of feedback notices. The Re-Entry seeks to address the identified problems and improve the overall efficiency and effectiveness of this NSO frontline service. The ReP intends to benefit clients by reducing their waiting time and minimizing their financial and opportunity costs from delayed issuance, defiant supporting documents, and recurring visits to NSO. This ReP satisfies the five qualifying criteria established by the Public Management Development Program (PMDP), namely: Citizen-centric, collaborative, relevant, innovative and visible. The ReP has strong citizen focus due to the fact that the service improvement directly impacts on the citizen as owner of the certificate. The collaborative characteristic is manifested in the Project Team composition, whose members come from several NSO departments. The ReP also satisfies the relevance criterion because it addresses a long-time concern of the NSO and offers the potential of significant cost reduction for clients. Likewise, the ReP is innovative in the sense that it seeks to interfere with other agencies to craft a sustainable solution to the problem of high incidence of feedback cases. Finally the ReP is compliant with the visibility criterion because the improvements can easily be felt by the citizens and the geographic scope of the service improvement is nationwide. This ReP has three components, each having its own focus. This report deals with Component 1, whose primary focus is on the centralized annotation infrastructure located at the NSO Central Office. Components 2 and 3 are separately handled by two other PMDP scholars. they concentrate mainly on civil registry decided by selected courts in Region 12 (component 2, and on public advocacy, dissemination and monitoring in Caraga (Component 3). During the ReP implementation period limited to September to December 2012, the target outcomes of Component 1 are to reduce the turnaround time for 20-19 working days, and to improve the On-Time Completion Rate represents the percentage of requests that are completed on or before the scheduled release date. The approved ReP Plan also committed 13 deliverable as outputs of the various ReP activities. Performance statistics compiled for December 2012 indicate that Component 1 of the ReP was able to achieve the of the ReP was able to achieve the target outcomes. The target turnaround time of 19 working days was met, likewise, the on-time completion rate as of December 14,2012) hit 83% which is significantly higher than the target of 75%. The 13 deliverables originally targeted as intermediate outputs were all completed. An additional output on cost-benefit analysis was also prepare. The most significant outputs of ReP Component 1 include the electronic annotation system, online report generation facility, manpower, estimation methodology, web based request query system, system performance report, and cost-benefit analysis. To a large extent, the key strategies adopted for this ReP included: (1) Review and streamlining of current processes, (2) Use of enhanced IT application systems, (3) Proper resource estimation allocation, (4) Provision of permission feedback, and (5) Adoption of Plan-Do-Check Act approach for continuous improvement. Various activities were carried out in support of these major strategies. A work plan incorporating the activities was adopted with a corresponding budget. Clients directly benefit from the ReP by way of shorter waiting times for their annotated documents. There are also significant cost savings, clients no longer needing to return multiple times to NSO because of overdue issuances or insufficient/erroneous supporting documents. In order to quantify the benefits derived from this ReP, a Cost-Benefit Analysis was conducted. The analysis revealed that benefits for outweigh costs, at a ratio of 14.7:1. The proponent derived valuable lessons in the course of implementing the ReP. Most notable are those pertinent to change management and the need for motivation. There was realization on the part of the proponent to continue on with the ReP despite the difficulties and struggle in writing the documentation and reports. Towards the end of the ReP report, the proponent described the value of the PMDP and how it renewed his desire to serve the people.