Restless for improvement

Topics: performance management, improvement, City of Westminster Council

On a fairly regular basis, the IDeA brings in external speakers. Invariably these events are always really good, with a fresh take on some aspect of local government or area governance.

Today Peter Rogers, Chief Executive of Westminster, was our speaker and he described his organisation as "restless for improvement". He has a low key, but really engaging speaking style. He covered a lot of really interesting topics, but a couple really stood out for me.

• Westminster had a peer review - an "international peer review" involving the then Mayor of Baltimore and now Governor-elect of Maryland.* Peter Rogers has been a peer reviewer himself, but he also said that peer reviews are a great way to reinforce self-awareness.
• Westminster undertook several studies -a local area study looking at some of their most deprived areas and a customer needs analysis. They also looked at how much money they had been spending in these areas (apparently it was a lot). They took this information to their partners who worked in the area. Funding was occurring in parallel - so much more effort was placed on defining and sharing outcomes and harnessing funding in train to achieve those outcomes. Local Area Renewal Partnerships have been developed to really help area partners focus on the achievement that needs to be made in 1 year, 3 years and 5 years down the line.
• As part of their improvement planning, Westminster mapped all of their services against a matrix of cost versus quality and with their 50 top managers planned how they would achieve improvement in quality and a reduction in cost through increasing efficiency.
• Peter Rogers challenged the notion of improving performance indicators across the board in a bid to improve satisfaction. Council-level performance indicators "average the misery" and don't tell you what residents in different areas prioritise. Tackling the things that really matter to different neighbourhoods means that you can see an increase in overall satisfaction, while the council level PI remains the same, and cost possibly goes down.
  

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*Martin O'Malley had been invited to take part in the peer review particularly for they way Baltimore has been working on policing and quality of life issues through their CitiStat performance management approach. I have blogged about that here.

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