PM Partner update

Update from the PM Partner site

I've created a new page called Resources for councillors and non-executives .The 2006 Local Government White Paper outlines a greater role for councillors in executive, ward and scrutiny roles. Councillors and partner body non-executives will need to develop and enhance their partnership working skills. I hope we'll highlight a growing number of resources - but for now in particular this highlights two recent IDeA publications Neighbourhood renewal and social inclusion: a councillor's guide to scrutiny and Inside Top Teams: A practical guide which includes a section on partnership working.

I've also added a link to a new set of IDeA case studies on what local government and the community and voluntary sectors are doing together called Journeys to Improvement on our Community and Voluntary Sector Page

I've also tabulated the results of the PM Partner participant survey which you can find here. As a project team and with colleagues, we still have to think about what to do with what you said - but there was a lot of food for thought. Even from early results, we could see that we needed to improve the navigation of the site - and I hope that we've done that.

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LSP futures

Topics: LSPs, communties of practice, LSP Futures

I attended an event on Wednesday for LSP Futures. LSP Futures is a non-profit network of partnership practitioners - such as LSP managers - and membership is by subscription. They meet regularly and focus on both policy and the practical issues of managing partnerships.

I was invited along to talk about PM Partner - a collaborative website focused on partnership issues - and about whether LSP Futures might want to use it to share their knowledge over the web. I also talked about the IDeA's new Community of Practice platform at www.communities.idea.gov.uk which is another web-based way of supporting face to face networks.

The event itself was largely focused on the White Paper and Paul Philpott and Cath Docherty from the DCLG helped to clarify some of the issues around LSPs and LAAs in the White Paper as well as improvement support for councils as well as partnerships.

Clearly there is still some room to play for - and interestingly Paul Philpott spoke about local authorities getting more involved in not just advising on guidance as it's developed but also writing guidance. This could be a more open way of going forward - a more mature relationship between central and local government. But - of course - we need to make sure that all local authority views are represented (and increasingly, too, the views of our partners in other sectors.)

We'll be discussing some of these issues in our forums at the Policy and Performance community of practice (registration required - but easy and free).

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I thought it was interesting that one of the things the network wanted to explore Results Based Accountabilty - which we have blogged about here before.



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New communities

Working on PM Partner has been a really interesting experience of collaborative knowledge-building. The site is still active and focused on performance management in partnerships, but we've opened a couple of new communities of practice as well.

These are hosted on the IDeA's community of practice platform - this is a semi-private online space. That is, you have to register to view any of the content - but anyone can join the two communities we've started

Policy and performance: this community is aimed at people who work in the area of developing or implementing improvement policy.

Performance management: this community is for people who want to share the latest developments on performance management - particularly around more detailed or technical aspects.



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Partnership quick hits

Topics: partnerships, crime, business, private sector, parish councils

Links to partnership news and examples

Innovation through partnership
Read about the liveability fund pilots and the successful work with neighbourhoods and communities on IDeA Knowledge

Together we can fight crime

Rising re-offending rates can only be brought under control with the support of local councils and their partners warned the Coalition on Social and Criminal Justice today. The coalition’s report, "Neighbourhood by neighbourhood: local action to reduce re-offending", says local organisations with local knowledge are best placed to work with the prison and probation services to help ex-offenders stay on the straight and narrow.

News from the Local Government Association

Parish pride in partnerships
Award-winning Staffordshire Connects partnership is honouring the role that parishes play in partnership, too.

Private and public sector crime fighting in partnership
An innovative partnership for sharing data and information between public agencies and business.

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