As we commission a greater proportion of services, we will be working with a more diverse range of providers and partnerships and local communities and individuals will have a greater role in commissioning for themselves. This will require clearly coordinated performance management that integrates service specific activity within a coherent overall framework, in order to ensure accountability, transparency and delivery of outcomes.

In order to respond to these challenges, this strategy sets out the vision for the Council’s performance, the cycle of delivery “performance management framework” and the shift that is required in the way in which we manage performance. The strategy can largely be summarised by several key underlying principles that should shape our new approach to performance management, which are as follows:

• Transparency, accountability and localism – if we are aiming to provide services which are tailored and responsive to people’s needs, and indeed go further than this and to actually devolve responsibility to communities to empower them to provide for their own needs, we need to base the measurement of our performance on the needs and wishes of citizens and share data and resources in a fully open and transparent way.
• Reduction of the burden of performance reporting by monitoring data on a risk assessed basis. In practical terms this means that, having established priorities in terms of improvement and performance, reporting will be by exception.
• Separating performance monitoring from performance management, with different outputs for business as usual performance monitoring and reporting as opposed to priority areas of focus that will require regular, active management.
• A subtle move away from the language of ‘continuous improvement’; in the current economic climate we have to focus on priorities for improvement, and even in some areas make a conscious decision on managed decline.

These key messages are the basis on which we will develop and implement our new performance management framework.

• Performance Strategy (132KB - pdf help)
• Appendix 1 - performance management guidance (50KB - pdf help)
• Appendix 2 - background and context (66KB - pdf help)