The key takeaway from the just-ended Integrated Results-Based Management and Performance Contracting workshop held from 23 to 25 February 2022 at Kadoma Hotel and Conference Centre is that it takes shared vision and collective action to achieve organisational goals.
Midlands State University Vice-Chancellor Professor Victor Ngonidzashe Muzvidziwa emphasised the need for hard work, teamwork, commitment and a right attitude if Team MSU was to achieve and even surpass goals set out in its strategic plan.
“We are here to evaluate the previous year, talk of building on the work we did last year and improve on areas that we did not do so well. All of us should rally behind innovation, industrialisation and commercialisation. Nobody should be left behind. It takes all of us to succeed,” Professor Muzvidziwa said.
MSU’s top managers reviewed the University’s strategic plan to align it to the parent Ministry’s Education 5.0 philosophy and the National Development Strategy (NDS 1).The fifth MSU strategic plan was adjusted to cover the same period (2021-2025) as the National Development Strategy NDS 1.The infusion of NDS 1 national priority areas into the MSU’s strategic plan will ensure that the University’s activities, research and innovations feed into the national vision of making Zimbabwe an upper-middle-class economy by 2030.
The Vice-Chancellor also encouraged MSU managers to actively look for opportunities to realise commercial value from research and innovations developed by staff and students.
“We ended the year 2021 on a high note with the graduation and the launch of three projects. There is need for a complete rethink of our way of doing business.
We want a significant proportion of our budget to come from research and innovation. The battle cry should be business.“We teach entrepreneurship in almost all faculties but we are taking it beyond that, we now want to operationalize that entrepreneurship and make profits, he said.
Central government introduced Programme Based Budgeting (PBB) at the beginning of 2021 to promote greater transparency, accountability, and data-driven decision making in all public institutions.Programme based budgeting uses the budget as a tool for making public management more results-focused.
“Remember Integrated Results-Based Management starts with you. You tell the world what you want to do and independent reviewers come to assess how you are doing in achieving goals you set for yourself in the national priority goal of human capital development and innovation,” said Professor Muzvidziwa.
In his closing remarks, the MSU Vice-Chancellor encouraged workshop delegates to take ownership of the strategic plan and diligently implement it to ensure the success of the institution and the nation at large.
MSU Acting Pro-Vice-Chancellor Research and Academic Affairs Professor Alois Chiromo concluded the workshop with a call for managers attending the workshop not to keep the documents to themselves but share them with members in their departments.
“The documents we developed here belong to all of us, let’s go back and cascade these to others. If we don’t cascade these strategies to those in our departments it will be difficult to implement the strategies in these documents,” he said.