Performance |
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Managing Performance and delivering improvements Last year, our external auditors acknowledged that ‘the Council is moving on from monitoring performance to managing performance’. At the heart of our approach to performance we continue to use the basic principles of agreeing priorities, setting budgets, resources and targets and reviewing delivery.
This year we have started a fundamental review we call the Performance Management Programme and this has already led to a redesign of the performance planning process which has changed the way the Corporate Plan and Service Plans look and are produced. We are also looking at the way we measure performance and report it and this Annual Report is a product of that. Cabinet members continue to look after thematic areas as portfolio holders, which helps to foster our one-council approach as they now each oversee numerous functions and services from across the Council. The creation of Key Priority Groups for each corporate priority, drawing membership from the Cabinet, senior management and key service staff, helps focus on what is important by constantly monitoring progress against our promises and meeting regularly to ensure that any barriers to achieving our goals are removed. To cascade performance management down through the organisation services produce their service plans which are based around corporate priorities and these in turn inform the content of individual employees’ appraisals. In addition performance monitoring reports are submitted to the Corporate Management Team, Cabinet and the Performance Management and Budget Scrutiny Committee on a quarterly basis. Overview and Scrutiny members are also active in monitoring the progress of Improvement Plans and progress against priorities. Performance monitoring information is available to all staff via the Council’s IT network. The performance management framework in a large organisation such as the Council can seem confusing but here is how it all fits together;
These internal arrangements exist against a background of a changing national regime. Comprehensive Performance Assessment is being replaced by the Comprehensive Area Assessment, where the emphasis is on the experience of the citizen living in or visiting an area – in our case the area is Worcestershire county. This will be introduced in 2009 but the new national performance indicators “National Indicators” are already in place and we have started to collect them in 2008. |
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