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At a strategic level there are three different kinds of data we need to ensure we learn and about and to understand how well we are delivering our strategic purpose/vision:
- Strategic Context / Intelligence – This is vital to understand our district and residents needs and perceptions.
- Strategic System Measures – This is data about our internal operations and the way we work.
- Strategic Outcomes – These need to be developed based on a clear understanding of what matters to people in our community.
In addition to these strategic measures it is important that we also measure what matters to our direct customers (service users). At an operational level we will therefore be looking at three kinds of measure:
- Operational Context – Measures relating to the context within which an operation works.
- Operational System Measures – These are often temporary measures that tell us how effective our system is.
- Customer Measures: these tell us about the things that matter most to customers.
Data needs to be useful and relevant to customers. It needs to help us learn so that we can improve. In this context, collecting, collating, analysing and using data is very much part core work of every managers in the Council.
This approach is focused on producing three main benefits:
- Delivering high quality services – ensuring service quality is maintained and, if possible, improved.
- Being an effective organisation – changing the organisation and the way that people in the organisation think about their work so that we can continuously improve.
- Balancing the budget - reducing costs and/ or increasing income so that we can address future budget deficits.
Service Area Plans
We want to measure things in the most effective way possible. We have recently developed a series of quality measures for our services. These are set out in Service Plans and have replaced the long list of performance indicators we used to collect. On the whole, softer measures will be used to measure how effective we are as an organisation. However, there are some quantifiable measures such as absence rates and staff turnover rates. We need to be able to forecast and monitor our forecasted budget deficit or surplus over the coming years. Service Area Managers have provided estimates of the savings for the projects they are leading. Whilst these will not be used as targets, they do provide us with a guide as to how likely we are to balance our budget each year.
Sections 1, 2, 3, 5 and 7 of each of the Service Area Plans form the Portfolio Holder Statements. These detail how the long term ambitions and priorities detailed within the Council’s Corporate Business Improvement Plan are being broken down into year by year activities within each portfolio holder’s area of responsibility.
Follow the links below for each portfolio holder statement for 2011/12. All documents are pdf format and open in a separate window.
Fit for the Future
We have now adopted a new approach which does not use targets as a basis for monitoring. We measure things to learn about how well we are delivering our purpose and what matters to customers and to enable us to understand what we need to do to continuously improve. So first and foremost, measures are about learning.
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