Language:
Search
 
GOYS portal
General Organization for Youth & Sports

A. Problem Analysis

 1. What was the problem before the implementation of the initiative?
The General Organization for Youth & Sports (GOYS) is the governmental body in the Kingdom of Bahrain that is responsible for the overall management of the activities of national sports clubs. It also manages nationwide youth activities. GOYS has several affiliates including 35 Youth Centers and 52 Clubs in addition to two flagship organizations “the Youth innovation center” and “Salman Center”. In this capacity, GOYS engages on daily basis with different stakeholders who require approvals and procedural support to participate in any sports events, process immigration or visa approval or even report their financial statements for Auditing purposes. This has resulted in a huge amount of red tape and endless paperwork submitted. The workflow effectiveness was in return impacted and any process used to take an average of 1 week to fulfill at best-case estimate. Parallel to that GOYS had a website presence that was static in nature and did not disseminate the right information required by the various stakeholders. The idea was to have an interactive web presence that enables ease of reach, acts as a platform for collaboration and ensures anytime, anywhere access to relevant information. GOYS began working on the designed architecture for the new portal to overcome the challenges below: • Limited reach to all stakeholders and to the youth at large. • Static information on the site • No social networking capabilities • Lack of a one-stop-shop to consolidate the Kingdom’s sport & youth activities calendar • Lack of community feedback or lack of interactive presence • No mobile access through handheld devices

B. Strategic Approach

 2. What was the solution?
GOYS embarked on a full e-services initiative with the objective of launching a fully collaborated online presence that allows direct interaction between the organization and its different constituencies in a seamless and efficient manner. Inherent to the new strategy was the ability to give anytime, anywhere access to the much-needed information, forms and content to all stakeholders. The objective of the General Organization for Youth and Sports' portal is to boost the support process of the youth sector in Bahrain and develop their skills, besides enabling them to deal with their present developments and challenges efficiently and effectively, and to improve the policies used to develop their potential. In September 2013, GOYS successfully launched its new citizen-centric portal that puts social at the heart of the communication process and cuts down time to process for all GOYS related processes and requests. The state of the art portal is accessible to organizations and citizens alike from any mobile device. The Portal was built on a technology that contains highly customizable functionality combined with very efficient features, which made it the best solution for GOYS. The strategy took advantage of the customizability features to help improve customers’ experience with the rich contents, enable the consolidation of the national sports calendar in addition to a search capability that lets users quickly retrieve the information that really want and recommend content that they’ll enjoy and share it through the different social media channels, coupled with the scalability features inherent to the technology, which allows people to access the information from any device, which is in line with the Bring Your Own Device worldwide technology trend.
 3. How did the initiative solve the problem and improve people’s lives?
1. Access to mobile devices is 3 times higher in penetration pc access specifically among the youth category. The portal comes to address this and truly enables interaction from anywhere anytime. 2. Social Media is a big component in today’s communication outlook. The portal enables citizens to, directly; interact with GOYS through Social Media Channels. 3. Offers a one-stop shop for all the important and relevant youth related events in the kingdom. Something that was not previously there before the launch of the portal 4. Dynamic layout, which allows for a constant change in the look n feel which improves the browsing experience and allows for user personalization.

C. Execution and Implementation

 4. In which ways is the initiative creative and innovative?
The methodology used is based on Microsoft Solution Framework: 1. Envision: envisioning involves creating a business vision and defining the scope of work necessary to bring the vision to reality (e.g., business case justification, business studies, etc.) 2. Plan: Planning continues through the development of detailed functional requirements, system and application architectures, the user interface prototype, and a detailed project plan for the remainder of the project 3. Build: The Build phase begins with the first iteration of development and culminates with the “functionality complete” milestone. 4. Stabilize: The Stabilization phase involves testing and acceptance 5. Deploy: The Deployment phase includes deployment of the core technology and site components, transitioning of the project to operations and support, and obtaining final Customer approval of the project.
 5. Who implemented the initiative and what is the size of the population affected by this initiative?
1. Different departments in GOYS: Provided the business logic and requirements for the newly launched portal. 2. Microsoft: provided the technology platform as well as the trusted advisor for collaboration solutions. At a later stage, Microsoft engaged to provide a deep health check and quality assurance prior to the launch. 3. Netways: is the prime contractor and Implementing Partner 4. eGA : Provided Advisory guidance on the e-services strategy implementation 5. Sports Clubs representation: was surveyed at earlier stages of the project during requirement gathering phases. 6. Ministry of Finance: Provided the required funding for the project. 7. Bahrain Tender Board: oversaw the process of tendering and awarded the right partner of choice.
 6. How was the strategy implemented and what resources were mobilized?
The GOYS portal project was the ideal solution that made the best use out of limited resources and time constraints. With an overall budget of BHD 25,000 and 4 months for go to market, the team have set a track record of achievement meeting every objective by breaking down the project plan into distinct, yet interrelated phases. These included: 1. Envisioning phase 2. Strategy Setting Phase 3. Selection and Awarding phase 4. Implementation Phase 5. Pre-launch quality assurance Phase 6. Project launch GOYS IT team have worked relentlessly with limited resources and against a very tough time target to deliver the project.
 7. Who were the stakeholders involved in the design of the initiative and in its implementation?
1. Speed: Quick time to market enabled us to respond to the problem with a concrete effective solution 2. Agility: the design of the portal enabled us to add different modules that pertained to the interest of the various stakeholders in a one-stop-shop format. 3. Accessibility: Accessing the much needed information and forms anytime anywhere was a key winning success factor 4. Ease of Use: the use of predominant technologies enabled high adoption rate among the different beneficiaries of GOYS 5. Identity: the ability to customize the look and feel to truly reflect what our stakeholders are most passionate about allowed for a direct connection with those individuals and entities alike. 6. National Impact: Given the high profile engagement, the launch of such project amplifies the strategic visibility of the sports industry in Bahrain and allows for well-earned credibility through the direct channel interaction with Bahraini citizens and sports enthusiasts.
 8. What were the most successful outputs and why was the initiative effective?
Launching the GOYS portal activated the concept of digital presence and interactive collaboration where many monitoring and reporting resources have been utilized to analyze the user behaviors, trends and traffic more insightful management decision making. One of the impressive tools built in with SharePoint is Business Intelligence, performance point and excel services, which gave us an advantage of measuring the success performance, and activities that were defined in the planning phase, based on PERT (program evaluation and review technique). A real time view of the data analysis, rich reporting enabled us to make faster decisions and insight on the performance that we need to enhance.
 9. What were the main obstacles encountered and how were they overcome?
1. Resistance to Change: working closely with EGA and adopting the e-services strategy has enabled us to bridge the digital divide and ensure a quick uptake of our online presence and services. In addition, youth adoption for technology is significantly higher than other segments of the society, which supported our notion for putting out e-services to the right target audience group. 2. Limited budget: 25,000 BHD is considered a limited budget for a sizeable project that serves nation-wide audiences. Optimization of resources occurred by choosing a renowned technology platform and a thorough selection of the implementing partner to ensure quality output that cuts down on the investment required for quality assurance and correction of errors. 3. Time constraints: the project was slated to be completed in 4 months time which is a record time for a large scale SharePoint 2013 implementation. Subject matter experts where engaged to work with GOYS team on cutting processes and working against a pre-set project management plan.

D. Impact and Sustainability

 10. What were the key benefits resulting from this initiative?
The initiative took a place to have benefits on the internal team along with the external (public); some of these benefits are: Internal Benefits: 1. Increase Accountability: One of the primary goals this initiative is to provide greater accountability for origination functions towards the public service, from tracking and monitoring processes to ensuring deliverables are met. By documenting all forms, records and working to optimize each one, the organization can achieve a system of checks and balances – thereby minimizing the potential for errors or loss and affirming that all employees are aware of their responsibilities. 2. Improve Reliability: Effective business process management that was built on the portal has the capacity to improve the reliability of information and its dissemination in a timely manner. It is critical for senior management/ department to receive accurate information as and when needed in order to make important and time-sensitive business decisions. When business processes are properly recorded and monitored, it is easy to locate the necessary data and quickly produce relevant reports. 3. Simplify Regulatory Compliance: From complying with the government laws, rules and regulations that our organization must follow. Comprehensive process management practices was built to help organizations keep track of their obligations, and ensure that they are in compliance with applicable standards and legislation. 4. Avoid Waste as the system involves assigning and tracking corporate resources, there is generally far less waste than in companies that do not actively monitor those resources. Therefore, it enhance efficiency and, ultimately, boost profitability. Regular performance reviews can identify possible instances of waste and inefficiency, and continuous process improvements can help to address them. Another benefit of the portal is that its capacity to enforce safety and security measures. By documenting proper procedures and mandating full compliance with them, organizations can help ensure staff safety and protect company assets – including physical resources and confidential information – from theft, loss or misuse. External benefits: 1. It gives the awareness of the organization vision and mission and the goal trying to achieve 2. It provide easy access of information from using any device that connects via internet 3. It support green environment from elimination paper work transition 4. It riches the concern department as they have record of the request from the submitter 5. It provide easy and simple to use portal with clear instruction 6. It reduce the time of processing a single request from the average of 40 working days for some requests to 15 working days, which empower the performance of the national clubs and youth centers.
 11. Did the initiative improve integrity and/or accountability in public service? (If applicable)
Public Advocacy on eService is a very active direction for the Kingdom of Bahrain, The national benefits for deploying eservices in public administration are interrelated and cover several aspects from Financial optimization to workflow enhancement across public sector organizations and from a citizen-centric perspective, eservices bring public institutions one step closer to the public. Furthermore, GOYS is very active internationally in advocating the benefits of its experience to other like-minded sports organizations in the region and will happily consult in support of any such organization embarking on a similar initiative.
 12. Were special measures put in place to ensure that the initiative benefits women and girls and improves the situation of the poorest and most vulnerable? (If applicable)
The overall experience was good and many lessons have been learnt. We should have spent more time on the preplanning and planning phase, and further consideration that needed to be addressed to the external and internal stakeholders. The points below will outline some of the points that we will defiantly consider in future projects. 1. Clear, appropriate and feasible goals. The goal should provide a clear picture of how our organization intend to the change since we have an internal and external change. 2. Analyze and plan; we need to plan properly, resources have to be allocated to the program and the steps required to achieve the define goals. 3. Establish condition for success; People need to be convinced of the initiative we planning to do and develop some commitments to avoid the resistance of change. 4. Monitoring and measurement; the project need to be timely monitored and measurement of the project. 5. Culture change; this need to be address carefully as we have a high resistance in the public sector by setting a user adoption program e.g.: awareness, proper development and training plan will help. 6. Total quality management; we need to identify a team which can implement a technique which focus on increasing competitiveness and the need to achieve the best practice, and they need to be aware of the benchmark in such activities.

Contact Information

Institution Name:   General Organization for Youth & Sports
Institution Type:   Government Agency  
Contact Person:   Nani Mohammad Butti
Title:   Ms  
Telephone/ Fax:   00973-39711168`
Institution's / Project's Website:  
E-mail:   nbutti@goys.gov.bh  
Address:  
Postal Code:  
City:  
State/Province:  
Country:  

          Go Back
Print friendly Page