Developing online tool to track national masterplans in SA

The South African government is in the process of developing a series of sector-focused masterplans as part of a comprehensive economic development push to protect and create jobs, deepen skills and capabilities, grow export revenue, and facilitate transformation and inclusive growth in key priority sectors across the economy. 

The formulation and implementation of the masterplans represent a significant challenge as coordination among stakeholders from different parts of government, the private sector and civil society is a critical determinant of success. A fundamental enabler of this coordination is monitoring and reporting data on the implementation of the masterplans, including tracking tasks, challenges, KPIs and blockages to implementation.

Genesis Analytics made use of design-thinking methodology to develop an online dashboard that monitors and visualises sector masterplans throughout their implementation lifecycle. 

The methodology allowed Genesis to empathise with the clients’ needs, define the challenge statement, ideate various solutions, prototype the solution with mock-ups for feedback, and finally build and test the solution. Genesis co-created the dashboards with the support of decision-makers and stakeholders.

Based on the needs of the client discovered in the empathise phase of the project, Genesis advised on the best data collection and visualisation tools to suit their needs and user requirements. 

The result is a web-accessible dashboard that makes use of user-friendly visualisations in PowerBI. The dashboards enable individual masterplan groups to monitor their implementation progress and aggregates the progress into a master dashboard to give decision-makers a view of their progress.

The dashboard tool enables individual masterplan implementation groups as well as decision-makers to prioritise interventions and target their economic development efforts where they are most required.