Role of Strategic Management Practices on Enhancing Service Delivery in the Judiciary of Kenya

Abstract

Strategic management practices are a combination of actions relating to strategic analysis, formulation, implementation and monitoring in order to achieve some desired goals. These actions are collective in nature and they offer support to managers and guide them on how to keep in touch with the external environment by showing them certain critical paths of development. Service delivery on the other hand is the act of providing services to customers. It is imperative that these services meet the established standard of care in terms of criteria and exhibit characteristics of being acceptable, accessible, available, affordable and accommodative. The study was aimed at establishing the role of strategic management practices on enhancing service delivery in the Judiciary of Kenya. The research design that was used was a case study of the Milimani Law Courts. The researcher used primary sources of data collection to conduct the study. The primary data was collected using an interview guide which facilitated the interviewees into giving more details about the research objective respectively. The interviewees of the study were officers of the civil registry, judges and magistrates. The collected data was examined for completeness and clarity and was analyzed using content analysis. The responses that were generated by the interviewees were recorded and categorized in accordance with the identified themes. The study established that the Judiciary had adopted different strategic management practices which enhanced service delivery. The study ascertained that Milimani law Courts undertakes situation and problem analysis as part of environmental scanning practices. In terms of strategy formulation, the study established that the judiciary had established a strategic direction with a clear vision, mission and core values that facilitated the institution’s achievement of its strategic goals and objectives which indeed enhanced the services it delivered. In implementation of the strategy, the study established that Milimani Law Courts had a well established organization culture and structure that enhanced service delivery. The study established further that despite the fact that Milimani Law Courts developed good plans to facilitate the administration of justice, there were challenges in their implementation that affected the quality of services which the institution delivered with resources allocation by the judiciary and financial capacity being cited to be insufficient. Another challenge was the shortage of judicial officers. The study also established that Strategy evaluation was undertaken through monitoring of the institution's Performance with technical capacity of some of the judicial officers being cited as the major challenge in adopting these practices since they affected the quality of the legal reports. The study concluded that the judiciary had adopted different strategic management practices in pursuit of the institution’s mandate to provide independent, accessible, fair and even responsive fora for dispute resolution and the development of jurisprudence. The study further made recommendations for the institution that were based on the findings. These recommendations included but are not limited to; capacity building through training of the RHC and RLC at Milimani law courts in order to improve their performance thus ensuring that justice is served effectively and efficiently.