A partnership by any other name?

Topics: partnership structures, LSPs, LPSBs

Blogging has been a little light this week, I've been on the road. Yesterday I was in Leeds at a policy and performance networking event for the Yorkshire and Humberside. My slot was talking about the PMMI project and some of the products that we've developed recently, specifically public involvement in performance management and prioritisation.

Most of it seemed to go down pretty well (no rotten fruit was tossed at me) but some people thought we needed a zingier title than public engagement in PM. I definitely get their point. Any ideas?

The other speaker on the bill was Philip Hume, Head of Policy at Kirklees. He talked about their approach to restructuring their local strategic partnership (LSP) into four themed Local Public Service Boards (LSPBs) which they say has helped improve partnership governance and accountability. This also helps them bring more people and the right people to the table for each theme. For example, a voluntary sector agency might not be a big enough strategic player to sit on an area-wide partnership executive, but is exactly the right agency to sit on a public service board looking to improve outcomes for children and young people.

Kirklees is using IT supported performance monitoring system called PERFORM. All of the partners have agreed to use this system. Soon, partners will be able to input data directly into the system and pull of their own reports. Others in the room discussed some of the difficulties they were having with incompatibility of systems, that is the council had procured one software package and partners (the PCT, Police) had bought a different package. They were recommending that if you're thinking about buying a package, it's probably worth having a word with partners to see if they're interested, too.

I was also very interested to hear about their review of partnership working in general at Kirklees. One of their conclusions was that they had a lot of things that involved collaborative working or networking, or were perhaps multi-agency working groups, but which weren't partnerships, per se. It may seem a little arbitrary to say these things aren't partnerships, but having this definition means that councillors are clearer about which bits of collaborative working need to have political oversight ( the partnerships) and which don't - the networks or working groups where decisions aren't made at nearly the same level.


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