The procedures are completed and the paperwork is neatly prepared. But if, at that moment, someone asks which tasks have been completed, which are delayed, which are stuck and where the bottleneck lies, the answer is not always immediately clear.

This shows that officer assessment is not about a lack of procedures; what is often missing is a real assessment of work.

In modern governance, evaluation is not only for summarizing results. It must help reveal the condition of the system. When leaders can look at a table of figures and immediately know which tasks are progressing and which are stalled, only then does assessment become an executive tool.

From that perspective, Cao Bang province is building a system to evaluate officials based on work indicators – commonly known as KPIs (key performance indicators) – with a very specific goal: each month, it should be possible to see which tasks are moving forward, which are slow, and which are stuck.

The management message is quite clear: meetings are not the goal. Reports are not the result. What matters is whether the work is actually resolved.

KPIs therefore are not treated as a management slogan. In the design of this system, each indicator is linked to a specific figure, with a defined data source and a fixed time for closing the data. These figures are not taken from reports but directly from operating systems such as document management software, the electronic one-stop service system, or public investment disbursement data.

This method aims to overcome a fairly familiar situation in the administrative apparatus: reports show good results, but work products do not appear clearly.

The assessment system is organized on three pillars.

The first pillar is task results. This is the most important part of the assessment. The question is very direct: has the assigned task been completed and completed on time, and what is the work quality.

Figures such as the rate of tasks completed on schedule, the number of overdue tasks, the quality of policy advice, the rate of administrative procedure processing, and the progress of public investment disbursement are all monitored regularly. When tasks are prolonged, when advisory documents are returned multiple times due to poor quality, or when projects fail to disburse funds on schedule, all of this appears in the data.

If the first pillar answers the question “has the task been completed,” the second pillar examines the effectiveness of the work. Many bottlenecks in public administration do not lie in policies, but in implementation. Issues that seem very specific, such as project preparation, site clearance, or handling of land records, can slow down an entire project.

The system also tracks indicators reflecting the process of resolving obstacles. How many project bottlenecks have been addressed, how has been the progress of land clearance, how long land records take to process, and what feedback citizens and businesses provide when carrying out procedures – these data help identify precisely where work is effective and where bottlenecks are emerging.

The third pillar concerns discipline and public service credibility. Many problems within the administrative system stem not from professional capacity but from weak administrative discipline. For that reason, the system also tracks indicators such as the timeliness of responses to official documents, citizen reception, and the handling of petitions.

After each meeting there must be clear conclusions, specific tasks, responsible individuals, and deadlines. If a meeting ends without concrete follow-up actions, it essentially fails to generate management value.

To prevent the system from existing only on paper, eight red-warning indicators are monitored regularly. These are the most visible signs of stagnation: tasks overdue by more than 30 days, advisory documents returned multiple times, projects with zero disbursement during a quarter, unresolved land clearance bottlenecks, overdue land records, administrative procedures delayed due to subjective errors, unresolved complaints about harassment, and meetings that produce no actionable outcomes.

By looking at these indicators, leaders can immediately identify where problems exist within the management system.

Many people may think a KPI system will create more work for the administrative apparatus. But its goal is actually the opposite: to reduce formalistic reporting. Instead of lengthy multi-page reports, leaders only need to look at figures that directly reflect how the system is operating.

An Hai