Abstract

SPECIAL SESSION: THE THIRD ROUND OF PEER REVIEWS IN THE EUROPEAN STATISTICAL SYSTEM – FINAL RESULTS AND THEIR IMPACT ON THE DEVELOPMENT OF STATISTICAL SYSTEMS
Chair: Jean-Pierre Poncelet, Eurostat, Director B
Abstratct
Taking up recommendations for future developments
Speaker: Eszter Nagy (Hungarian Central Statistical Office)

The peer review process provides an ideal starting point for the drafting of strategical documents and more detailed development plans for the national statistical institutions (NSIs).
The recent self-assessment questionnaire has been designed in a way that it serves as a basis for the SWOT analysis of all business processes of an NSI, including administrative, functional tasks. This provided the opportunity to identify weaknesses and areas for development early on in the peer review exercise in an already structured way. Furthermore, any projects that were underway could be integrated into the overarching view of the European Statistics Code of Practice (ESCoP) while identifying the connections to the indicators of the ESCoP.
The SAQ-s naturally served as input for the peer teams to derive information about the priorities and goals of the NSI. The actual projects and plans were most often reflected in the recommendations taking into account the focus areas of the current round of the peer reviews. The on-site visit allowed to discuss these directions in more detail and the NSIs had the possibility to indicate issues which could benefit from the support that the official recommendations could provide.
All of the above resulted in recommendations that in many cases aligned with the NSIs own plans for development and strengthened their directions and priorities allowing for better communication within and outside the NSI.
The improvement action plans that need to follow up the recommendations are another useful tool that allows for the structured planning of the details of the directions of the developments. The SMART approach is a way to produce a plan that can be smoothly integrated into the internal working plans both yearly and multi-annual and makes it easy to monitor and assign KPIs and costs to each action.
As the preparation for the peer review needed an NSI-wide coordination and the collaboration of all areas of the offices, the drafting of the improvement actions also involved all departments. This resulted in a top-down approach to the drafting of the action plan, which proved to be effective and also helped the understanding of the purpose of the individual recommendations and their interpretation to the work of the different departments of the office.