Modernising Administration - SIMPLEX

In 2017, stock was taken of the development and conclusion of the SIMPLEX measures bearing in mind the goals set for each one. Of the measures, we note the following:

• Those under the Secretariat-General of the Presidency of Council’s remit (SGPCM), namely PCM Online, the GOGA-Network for Information Sharing of the SGPCM and P(eople)CM;
• Those under the cabinet of the Secretary of State for the Presidency of the Council of Ministers (PCM), specifically REVOGA + and UNILEX.

Below, please find a description of the nature of each of these measures, as well as the outcomes reached.

PCM Online is the most innovative solution for the SGPCM’s internal network: a reformulated intranet to automate administrative procedures and make the practices more agile, transparent, and collaborative.

This platform is not narrowed down to the SGPCM; it can be used by all the entities and cabinets under the PCM’s universe. As such, the intranet is suited to all the different organisations’ needs while fostering intra and inter-department synergies.

In sum, the solution’s critical success factor is its flexibility in offering responses to the Government’s needs and the various cabinets within the PCM. In this sense, the PCM Online was used as a tool for monitoring programmes that cross the entire Government.

As the name implies, this is a forum for the exchange of knowledge, especially best practice within the PCM, with the PCM Online offering technological support (measure #179). 

Following this logic, the GOGA built a repository of information to mitigate the impact of human resources’ turnover, which happens in the Government’s centre. Plus, at the same time, this measure was a pilot test for replication under the Competências@AP (skills) (measure #80).

P(eople)CM is a project to restructure human resource management at the SGPCM by re-engineering procedures and making them paperless.

Under this measure, a working group was set up for the human resources department with the aim of implementing initiatives that would gradually, effectively, and sustainably foster the quality of the services provided in developing this management model.

In this, sense, the activities put into practice were essentially to restructure the processes underlying the requests made by the SGPCM cabinets, entities, and workers; improving communication; the systematisation and consolidation of technical-legal content for the ministerial cabinets; processing the payroll; and a system for monitoring the human resource management indicators for a more concise analysis of performance and evolution of this unit.

Revoga + is a measure for the systematic and sectoral reduction of the legislative archive by conducting a detailed survey of the bills that from 1975 to 1978 either fell out of use or whose purpose was extinguished and therefore shouldn’t be contained in the internal legal scheme.

Of this survey conducted over nine months by five workers from the SGPCM multidisciplinary team Digesto, 1589 laws were indicated as having fallen out of use.

An internal mechanism of the PCM’s Secretary of State’s internal cabinet was set up in 2016 to make sure all the projects of legal deeds are subject to a legislative consolidation test: UNILEX. Through this mechanism, solutions for the use/merger and legislative coding were studied and proposed whenever this possibility is identified during the legislative procedure.

Among others, the following legal schemes were consolidated:

• Legal scheme on potatoes for human consumption and seed potatoes – Decree-Law 14/2016 of 9 March;
• Law on Public Health:
• Legal scheme to regulate the production, control, certification and sale of agricultural species and horticultural species – approved by the Council of Ministers;
• Scheme to access administrative and environmental information and the reuse of administrative documents - Law 26/2016 of 22 August.

With a view to drive sectoral consolidation, inter-ministerial pilot groups were set up: the first between the PCM and the Cabinet of the Minister of Home Affairs (MAI); and the second between the PCM and the Cabinet of the Minister of the Environment (MAmb). In the first group, the drafting of a project for consolidation of the legislation in terms of Preventing Road Safety was ongoing. In the second, a project for consolidating the legislation on specific waste management flows was carried out.