Water

Water Champion: M A M S L Attanayake
Innovating an Institution
December 2008

By Ma. Christina Dueñas
Water Knowledge and Communications Coordinator, ADB

Mr. MAMSL Attanayake is the Deputy General Manager for the Regional Support Centre- Central of Sri Lanka’s National Water Supply and Drainage Board (NWSDB), the principal authority providing safe drinking water and facilitating the provision of sanitation in Sri Lanka. As a young engineer fresh out of college, he worked on a water resources development project for the Mahaweli Ganga, Sri Lanka’s longest river at 320 kilometers. Barely 2 years into the sector, he realized that his real interest lies in domestic water supply and sanitation. In 1984, he joined NWSDB as project engineer for the Colombo sewerage project. Mr. Attanayake rose from the ranks, working on various water supply and sanitation projects for Greater Colombo and the Kandy district. By 2002, Mr. Attanayake became Deputy General Manager (DGM) of NWSDB’s North Central Regional Support Centre. NWSDB established regional support centers to decentralize its operations and improve its productivity. Each center is headed by a Deputy General Manager. In addition to daily operations, the centers manage projects to expand water supply services to villages and towns within their jurisdiction. In May 2007, he moved to the Central Regional Support Cente, again serving as DGM, and managed several reforms that are currently producing positive results for NWSDB. Among these reforms are the establishment of quality circles, implementation of a customer charter, benchmarking and twining programs, adoption of innovative human resources practices, improved cost recovery, and more. During his 27 years in the field, Mr. Attanayake also was instrumental in founding the country’s Lanka Rainwater Harvesting Forum and Rural Water Collaborative Group, successfully developed a low cost water treatment technology for iron removal, and served as trainer on sustainability issues.

Why did you choose to work in this sector?

As a child, I used to live in a small village called Amunugama, which was close to the Mahaweli Ganga, Sri Lanka’s longest river. We’d have water springs in our backyard during the rainy seasons but dry spells meant walking long miles to the river so we can bathe and wash clothes. On the other side of the river was the Kandy municipality, where everyone enjoyed piped water throughout the year. I thought, if that’s possible for Kandy, why not for the rest of us?

How does the Government deal with the water supply and sanitation situation in Sri Lanka?

In 1980, 40% of diseases in the country are water borne. Only 32% of the populace had piped connections. Urbanization and industrialization also created many settlements outside the urban centers, leading to health and environmental complications. These prompted Sri Lanka to invest heavily in the water sector.

The Government prioritized water in its national development framework and even established last year a separate ministry dedicated to water supply. We expanded the water supply system in urban and semi-urban areas, upgraded the treatment process, introduced rural water supply schemes, and launched catchment protection programs to ensure that we were addressing the water situation in an integrated manner.

How does NWSDB prep itself to fulfill its mandate?

We keep introducing reforms meant to improve our ability to serve.

Considering that we were a highly centralized organization, perhaps our most progressive reform was the decentralization of operations to 12 regional support centers (RSCs), which became responsible for managing water supply projects in their jurisdiction. NWSDB assigned senior managers to head each center, and this facilitated decision making closer to the customers.

Another innovation was our customer charter, which guarantees minimum service standards to the customers and ensures value for their money. We also built the capacity of our employees, not just technically but also for designing innovations and effective decision making. We did the latter through quality circles and new human resources practices.

Currently, we are piloting the design and implementation of a Total Management Plan, a tool that will hopefully make our fire-fighting management style obsolete since it forces us to proactively think about the factors threatening our water supply and sanitation systems.

How did the customer charter come about?

It was actually a suggestion from one of the quality circles that was brought to the forefront by the NWSDB under the direction of the Ministry of Water Supply & Drainage in Sri Lanka. We noticed that 70% of the complaints we received annually could have been avoided if minimum service standards were known and agreed to by both the NWSDB and our customers. Also, response time would be drastically cut if even the lowliest of staff had detailed guidelines on how to handle routine situations.

It took us a while to put this charter in place. Our biggest barrier was the traditional staff mentality—some felt that customers had no right to question the service they’re getting nor the systems and procedures implemented by NWSDB. The process mapping, streamlining of procedures, and identification of minimum service levels helped them understand the need to keep customers happy.

How has the customer charter improved your service?

Speaking for my area—RSC Central—I’m very happy to say that the number of complaints dropped by 60%, managers spend more time managing than firefighting since they can delegate more responsibilities, and staff able to handle routine service requests and incidences without instructions from the managers. What’s most telling, our customer satisfaction rating has increased significantly.

Of course, this is not to say that we’ve attained our vision. We’ve made progress, but we’re still a long way off. We continuously improve our processes, systems, and infrastructure, and we benchmark ourselves against the best utilities to see how far we still have to go.

What about quality circles (QCs)? How do they work?

NWSDB adopted QCs as a tool to empower employees and, in the process, raise their productivity. The circles work on a particular issue or task, innovate or make suggestions in terms of cutting down costs, streamlining the processes, or improving the technology. It’s a deviation from the traditional top-down management style so that the staff, as teams, will have more leeway to make decisions and introduce changes.

In the Central area, we established task-based QCs composed of a cross-section of employees involved in a particular function or assignment. We also have a conceptual QC, comprising senior managers, which mentors the former plus a technical QC to guide the technical aspects of each workplace. At the regional level, we have another QC handling human resources issues.

How did the employees react to these quality circles?

There were mixed reactions at first. Some were supportive but others felt threatened, thinking that the circles would exploit them or make their jobs redundant.We had to address a lot of doubts while attempting to get the quality circles moving.

What concrete service improvements did the QCs bring?

In truth, not all quality circles were sustained. In RSC (Central), we recently introduced a regional level productivity steering committee to give these QCs a boost. But tThose that worked were able to make positive changes in our operations.

As concrete example, let me tell you about the changes in Polgolla, Kandy municipality, in the last 3 years. Supply hours increased from 12 hours to 24 hours daily. Water losses went down from 40% to 25%. Household connections increased by 7000. Average number of customer complained declined from 487/annum to 60/annum.

A year ago, 2 water schemes—in Galagedora, Naula and Nalanda—had many customer complaints, no water, poor service, and high absenteeism among workers. When the customer charter and QCs were introduced, workers’ presence increased, and they improved their work sites and introduced short cuts to facilitate service, e.g. reducing number of visits to a site before installing the connection.

How did you equip your staff to handle the additional responsibilities?

We systematically built their capacity using a non-conventional HR approach. We wanted multi-functional, dedicated employees who can deliver results consistently.  That’s a tall order and we’re still working at it.

To start with, we encouraged staff to train in at least 2 disciplines, and give more training opportunities to those willing to devote more than 5% of their time to in-service training.  We also trained them as trainers—both so they can beef up their expertise and then transfer their knowledge to other staff.

We’re also currently mapping almost all the processes involved in service delivery.  Once that’s done, we will reengineer and standardize the operational procedures so that decisions could be taken at the lowest level closest to the customer.

To ensure productivity, we’ve outsourced labor-intensive work through performance-based contracts.  This reduced our staff per 1000 connections ratio from 10 to 7, and enabled us to increase our customer base by 10% with just a 2% increase in staff.

What insights can you share from your experiences in shaping up the NWSDB staff and organization?

Improving the performance of any organization is a gradual process but it helps if we cultivate a customer-oriented culture and synchronize staff capacity building with investments and infrastructure build up.