PM in district councils

I spoke at an LGA conference on performance management in district councils today. It's always hard to judge how well you've done at these things, but certainly no rotten fruit was thrown. I was speaking in the post-lunch spot, which has two distinct disadvantages:

1. People were likely sleepy after the excellent catering
2. I was a little too busy thinking about what I was going to say later to pay 100% attention to what the morning speakers were saying.

Cate McDonald from the Audit Commission outlined the new "lighter touch" CPA for district councils. Mark Poppy, the Deputy Chief Exec of Welwyn Hatfield council spoke about their experience as a recent DCPA pilot - and about their passion for performance and the role of good managers in getting the best performance. Rupert Dewhirst of the Institute of Public Finance outlined the requirements of the Use of Resources assessment. Rupert always does well at handling what can be seen to be an incredibly dry topic - and a really important topic. I think as a sector, we need to get much better at assessing value for money, but this means combining financial and performance management - often handled by different teams and different people. It was also good to see him again, as I'd done some work with him on the Improvement Network website. Kate Picknett rounded off the morning with an interesting perspective on their involvement with the Area Profiles project. She's from Penwith Council - the most southwesterly district in England - and they have some interesting - if not quite unique - problems with housing affordability and pockets of deprivation among great prosperity. Some of the work they'd done in focusing down to small areas had impact on their Local Area Agreement (LAA) negotiations - Cornwall does really well in certain areas (e.g. educational attainment) but within these areas of deprivation - improving attainment is definitely stretching performance - and they felt is should be included in their LAA.

I spoke about some of the key lessons from PMMI, but also how we're looking to carry that learning forward and build on it - part of this will be to develop learning from the PM Partner project - about how we can get performance management stories from a community of practitioners. Nigel Riglar, of Stroud DC, followed with (as ever) a very entertaining discussion of their improvements to their planning service - but with fantastic metaphors around the Titanic. Who's driving your ship? Are you avoiding icebergs and getting folks into lifeboats - or are you actually gonna make it to New York? Nick Easton spoke about the IDeA/LGA new performance framework. I'd seen him speak before on this to a similar audience a few months ago - and no reflection on Nick, but the audience was much more engaged this time. I think people are now really hungry to take on the challenge and see this as a good time to be ambitious about a sector-led approach to regulation. We're all going to need to be engaged with this approach and support each other.

The conference finished off with a two-hander from David Cook, Chief Executive of Kettering Borough Council and Deborah Snow who talked about the "Top 20 performance indicators". Now even I, a performance management junkie, thought that sounded a little dry. But they gave a great presentation - largely on getting the basics right. David Cook had the best "back to the floor" type tip. He regularly listens in on randomly selected customer calls to the council on tape on his drive home. This helps him get a finger on the pulse of what the main customer issues are, and also on how customer service is being handled in the council.

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