COMITE NATIONAL DE L’ENVIRONNMENT DES AFFAIRES (CNEA)

April 5, Rabat  #IBMCSC  #CSCMorocco10 #CitizenIBM

Today is the third day of our assignment with CNEA. In English, it stands for the National Committee for the Business Environment. After a brief but formal kick-off on 3rd April, our sub-groups got cracking on their individual assignments. My group consists of Peter Guest, from Edmonton, Canada; Rina Akiyama, from Tokyo and John Quillinan from Florida. We have diverse skill sets that are  complementary and we make a congenial team. Our customer(s) are warm and friendly and are jokingly encouraging us to deliver our final presentation in French and Arabic. Our key customer contacts are Thami EL MAAROUFI, the suave Advisor (Director) and Yassine MEDDAD & Abderrazak MOURCHID, Project Managers, both sprightly.

CNEA was set up in 2010 by the Moroccan Government. It is an inter-ministerial agency, headed by the Prime Minister, mandated to improve the business and investment climate in Morocco. Last year, Morocco’s ranking in the World Bank annual survey of Ease of Doing Business in 190 countries was 68. This compared to 128/190, in 2010, suggests that the country is doing several right things. But now Morocco wishes to break out in the premier league among nations for ease of doing business and there is more work to do. CNEA, therefore, acts as the nodal agency for coordinating initiatives across several ministries; for championing public-private partnerships and bringing several stakeholders like chambers of commerce, banks and confederation of enterprises together to create a national strategy for improving the business environment.

Entrance to the CNEA Facility

There is only so much you can do in four weeks and after three days of brainstorming with our customer, we come close to finalising our scope of work. CNEAs biggest pain point is that it lacks a Program and Project management culture and also the appropriate tools for them to successfully coordinate and manage multiple projects. These projects typically fall in four categories i.e. i) modernisation of legal & regulatory framework ii) simplification of administrative procedures iii) eGovernance iv) creation of single-window facilities.

We settle on conducting a diagnostic of CNEAs existing project and program management methods; share best practice frameworks from PMI, Axelos and IBM’s own 7-Keys methodology and agree to deliver a terms of reference along with functional specifications to help CNEA build or buy a new collaborative program management platform.

We end our day feeling assured that we have a grip of our project.