Home Office Good Practice Seminars
Partnership Working Seminar
Workshop 1
Performance Management
John Tench, Carnoshaw, and Julia Wickson, Acting Assistant Chief Executive, Portsmouth City Council
Main points from the workshop
Different organisations have different views on what performance management is. It is important that partners reach a consensus and agree a performance management framework.
Performance management should be built in to strategies, teams and projects at the outset. Information about what works/good practice should be used at an early stage, as this helps to cut down on the amount of evaluation required.
There needs to be more investment in people skills. The focus should be on how people operate as a team, rather than on target chasing. Training and development is an important aspect.
Projects and strategies should be kept simple. A small number of them will help you focus on a few clear objectives in priority areas. Key targets should describe what is an achievement in each priority area.
There is often tension between national and local targets. There needs to be a balance between the two in strategies.
Project management needs to be kept tight. Many crime reduction projects are small scale and do not require sophisticated techniques such as PRINCE2 to manage them.
Any performance management system should measure partnership outcomes rather than those of its individual agencies. This means that it is important for partnerships to have a collective vision for what they want to achieve.
Research from the health arena in performance management can be useful (see references).
The same people attending the same meetings (often the case in crime reduction) can be de-motivating and debilitating. Networks and informal ways of working could assist.
Download the PowerPoint presentation (312 Kb)
Useful references
Best Value
Believe it when you see it, IDeA (Improvement and
Development Agency) 2000, available on the IDeA
website:
Report details: www.idea.gov.uk/news/?id=believe
Full document (44 pages) www.idea.gov.uk/news/believe_full.pdf
560 Kb
Performance Management
Measuring the performance of Community Safety
Partnerships, Accounts Commission/Audit Scotland, 2000,
(uses the concept of the balanced scorecard) available
in full on the Audit Scotland website: http://www.audit-scotland.gov.uk/publications/pdf/2000/00l05ac.pdf
185 Kb 36
pages
Planning with a purpose: local authorities and the
NHS, Health Development Agency (HDA), 2003 available in
full on the HDA website: http://www.hda-online.org.uk/documents/planning_with_a_purpose.pdf
277 Kb 42
pages
Making performance management work, IdeA, 2002, details from the IdeA website: http://www.idea.gov.uk/publications/?id=ct0025
Change here: managing to improve local services, Audit Commission, 2001, available in full on the Audit Commission website in various formats. View the contents pages and report options
Performance breakthroughs, Audit Commission, 2002, available in full on the Audit Commission website in various formats. View the contents pages and report options
Last update: 16/02/04