SAI Young Leaders (SYL) Program 2019-2020

What is SYL?

SYL program is a leadership program of INTOSAI IDI. It aims at ‘changed SAI Young Leaders contributing to positive change in SAIs’. The SYL is recognized as a capacity development program in the IDI’s SAI Strategic Management Framework, which aims at creating changed SAI young leaders who will change their SAIs to contribute value and benefit for citizens.

Background of the Program

In 2015, the IDI launched the SAI Young Leaders Program with the Global Leadership Symposium as a kickoff. The IDI conducted a pilot SAI Young Leaders initiative from 2017-2018. In 2019, the IDI has been continuing with the second round of the initiative. In December 2018, invitations were sent out to all SAI’s including the TCA. Every SAI’s nominated young leader candidates, their projects (change strategies) and their coaches for the 2019-2020 SYL Program. The IDI followed a selection process consisting of two rounds of screening to select 25 candidates for participation in the SYL 2019-2020. After the screening process, TCA’s young leader and her coach participated to the SYL 2019-2020 with the other 25 SYL’s.

Participant Countries

Botswana, Costa Rica, Estonia, Fiji, Finland, Hungary, India, Jamaica, Kosovo, Kuwait, Liberia, Malaysia, Maldives, Oman, Pakistan, Philippines, PNG, P.R. China, The Gambia, Tunisia, Turkey.

Participants from the TCA

The selection process consisted of two rounds. As the first round, the change strategy proposals of SAIs were screened by the IDI. As the second round, the experts interviewed with young leaders of change strategies that passed the first screening. 69 projects and young leaders from various countries were assessed by the IDI in this procedure. As a result of two rounds of selection process, the TCA’s change strategy, “Developing a Communication Strategy”, the young leader, Ms. Emine Ersöz, and her coach, Mr. İbrahim Uzunöz, have been accepted to the 201-2020 SYL program.

Program Outputs and Outcomes

The program’s main output is the graduation of participant young leaders from the program by 2020. The implementation of individual change strategies and a positive change in SAIs are main outcomes of the program.

This program aims to focus on the young leaders (leadership competencies etc.) as well as the change strategies. While milestones of change strategies are going to be followed up by the IDI within the timeline of the programme, implementation of the change strategies are planned to be sustainable and have long term effect at SAI’s level.

What Has Been Done So Far?

After the selection process, with the participation of 23 SYL’s and 21 coaches, the first interaction of SYL’s took place in Cape Town, South Africa between 13-24 May 2019.

This interaction was a workshop consist of theory of the change management, preparation of a change strategy and implementations of this strategy. There were also application sessions on various topic including four components of the change strategies which are ME Plan, Coaching Plan, Exposure Plan and SAI Change Strategy.

In this interaction, core values of the SYL’s community were determined. And also, theory of the change management, preparation of a change strategy and implementations of this strategy was presented by the IDI. An emotional intelligence workshop was held for both young leaders and coaches.

At the end of two-week interaction, participants are expected to have their integrated change strategies, ME Plan, Coaching Plan, Exposure Plan. By 15th of August 2019, every SAI submitted their updated and approved SAI Change Strategy to the IDI.  Young leaders has started to implement their strategies in participant SAIs.

By 2nd of March 2020, main outputs were presented to the IDI by SYLs.

At the end of May 2020, the second interaction of the SYL program would have taken place in Vienna, Austria. However, this meeting had been delayed from spring to autumn of 2020 due to the COVID-19 outbreak. Since global travelling still seemed difficult in autumn 2020, virtual interactions for the SYLs were held between October 15^th and December 15^th.

During these interactions, many webinars were carried out on different subjects like strategic management, communication, data analytics. And every week, SYLs shared their views on different topics such as SAIs’ independence, leadership stories, stress management on a discussion forum. Lastly, all SYLs presented their change strategies and lessons learned during this journey.

The TCA’s Change Strategy

Communication is a significant tool for any successful organization.  TCA is well aware how important having good communication channels with stakeholders is to achieve the strategic goals and to contribute an effective, efficient, transparent and accountable public financial management system. 
In this respect, the TCA decided to contribute to the SYL program by developing a communication strategy. The project objective is to develop an agile, efficient and effective communications strategy to achieve organizational goals, to engage effectively with stakeholders, to increase recognition of the organization.
There are eight-step implementation plan of the project:

During the preparation works of the 2019-2023 Communication Strategy, strengths-weaknesses and opportunities-threats were primarily identified as a result of an analysis on the internal and external environment of the TCA via the SWOT method, and then stakeholders were determined. These stakeholders were prioritized based on their interests in and influences on the TCA activities and those having key roles were determined, and all stakeholders were categorized. Afterwards, stakeholder expectations were presented, and communication objectives and strategies to be implemented to achieve these objectives were developed for each stakeholder.

The draft Communication Strategy of the TCA was approved and came in to effect in July 2020. While some actions were already implemented in 2019 as short-term wins, many other of those were implemented successfully in 2020 despite of COVID-19.

Consequently, this strategy, where internal and external stakeholders included in the 2019-2023 Strategic Plan are taken into consideration, aims to create value for the citizens, the parliament and the other stakeholders, to increase the audit impact through effective stakeholder engagement and, in this way, to make significant contributions to strengthening accountability and transparency in the public sector.

What is Next?

SYL 2019-2020 program has been completed successfully as of December 2020. IDI has already started preparations for the 2020-2021 program.

The TCA is going to continue to implement the strategy, follow up and monitor the activities and measure the impact of them.