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.
  

_____________

*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.

Back to main page

Back to main page

Topics: performance management, IT systems

You might have heard of CompStat. It was an approach used by the New York City police department to tackle crime through performance management. The approach is supported by a GIS based information system that help police and the Mayor identify crime hot spots and to track performance - but really it was about regular accountability meetings for senior managers to discuss that performance and identify solutions to tackle underperformance and praise good performance. (Occasionally the approach was criticised for having too much "accountabilty" and not enough recognition).

The City of Baltimore took CompStat one step further and came up with Citistat. This looks at local government performance as well as police performance (in most US cities, the police force is directly accountable to the head of local government). They have a lot of interesting information about their approach on the Baltimore CitiStat website (including new information on how neighbourhoods and even smaller communities can take advantage of some of the tools and approaches for improving quality of life). A couple of years ago, Baltimore's mayor, Martin O'Malley came to visit the City of Westminster as part of a Peer Review team.

The London Borough of Barnet uses the approach, too where it's called FirstStat - though I don't know much about it.

Now councils North of the Border are giving it a try.

From the Scottish Executive:

The Executive set up pilots of the Citistat performance management system in two NHS Boards, Tayside and Ayrshire & Arran, and two local authorities, City of Edinburgh and Aberdeen City. The pilots ran from September 2005 for six months. Findings from the evaluation of the pilots include:

• The model can be adapted to Scotland's public sector and can respond to local circumstances
• The process improves the quality of information and makes it easier to understand and scrutinise that information
• Improved quality of information and regular meetings to scrutinise performance allows active follow up, overseen by senior management, and better results

You can download the report here, which includes case studies from all four organisations.

Story via eGov Monitor
_______________________

As far as I know, few performance management systems feature in bestselling murder mysteries. But in Patricia Cornwell's novel Southern Cross a CompStat style PM IT system is an important part of the plot.

Back to main page