Short summary
This page explains how to build consistency across services, set improvement priorities, plan work, and evaluate results. It includes templates you may wish to use or adapt including work plans and evaluations for both large and small projects and service areas.
Key information
- All services need to work towards a consistent approach so corporate assessment is reliable.
- Improvement priorities must be manageable, ambitious and based on reliable data.
- Service plans tend to include: business as usual performance measures; actions to be achieved that link to council wide priorities and improvement actions and performance measures.
- Improvement priority projects should be evaluated at least yearly or at project end.
Consistency
Some service areas in local authorities will have adopted consistent approaches already. Other areas may not have been exposed to such an approach previously. To gain a coherent and robust assessment of performance and quality at senior level, all council services will need to work towards some level of implementation of this approach. This has two purposes:
- To improve their knowledge of themselves and the identification of improvement actions
- To ensure that valuable evidence of continuous improvement is easily collated at a senior level.
If a corporate assessment draws on inconsistent data quality and varied levels of rigour, the overall picture may be flawed.
Improvement priorities
Improvement priorities should be based on reliable and accurate data. Keep the list small enough to deliver, while still being stretching and ambitious. Identify, plan, carry out and evaluate all improvement actions in a systematic way. This helps manage resources and staff time, and supports clear reporting.
Hold all improvement activity in one place within a Council Improvement Plan or an existing business or delivery plan, so the Senior Management Team can oversee it. Improvement actions in services should align with this plan and feed progress into it.
Large scale or strategic activity should follow a standard format, with progress reported to a central group, such as the senior management team or a group tasked with monitoring improvement. Smaller or service level projects should use a shorter template and be monitored by the Senior Management Team through updates to the Service Improvement Plan.
Improvement Planning
Each council will have their own approach to service plan, the type of information you would expect to see would be:
- Business as usual performance measures, which demonstrates work delivered
- Actions urgent or regular review work, such as policy reviews that will contribute to council wide priorities. These lead to improvement but are not intended to change how things are done.
- Improvement priorities, a small set of actions designed to test and drive improvement, monitored and evaluated.
To bring everything together, an authority can use a single plan monitored by the senior management team. Leads update progress at agreed intervals. Check out the resources section for an example plan template.
Evaluation
All improvement activity needs evaluation to understand what worked, what should be scaled, and what needs a different approach. Improvement activity should be evaluated once a year or at the project end, whichever is sooner. An example pro forma is provided in the resources section.