Strategy Development Processes In The Government Departments In Kenya

Abstract

Current trends show that the public sector organizations are being influenced heavily by the private sector management practices (Rose and Lawton, 1999). The Kenyan public sector including the government departments/ministries is no exception though for Kenya this is a fairly new phenomenon. Since the introduction of the second phase of the Civil Service Review Programme (CSRP11), all the ministries and departments are required to develop strategic plans. The respective plans will articulate the strategic direction of each ministry/department, its policy priorities, objectives and strategies. This study set out to find out how the government departments are carrying out their strategy development since its introduction. The objectives of the study are, to establish strategy development processes and to identify the factors influencing strategy development in the government departments. At the time of study there were 131 departments. A sample study of 48 departments was chosen. The assumption we made in this study was that since the same Permanent Secretary (PS) runs all the departments in a ministry then strategy development in all departments should be similar for all those departments. It is on this basis that we randomly chose two (2) departments from all the ministries to be our study units. The response rate was 67%. The findings have been able to satisfy the objectives of the study. They have demonstrated that the departments have no one particular way of strategy development. Though 100% of the departments have it down that they are using the planning process, signs of the command view and logical incrementalism are very evident. The findings also reveal that the realized strategies will somehow fall short of the intended strategies due to cultural and political processes. Imposed strategies also affect the intended strategies.