Like many other authorities, Warwickshire sees performance management as a key tool to improve services. Without it, it’s difficult to demonstrate how your service helps to achieve the shared priorities of both local and national government. How does it go about it? Ayub Khan explores the issues.
'Those excellent councils with strong performance management arrangements had clear frameworks that support council priorities and link to planning and budget setting. Their monitoring centred on key priority performance indicators that were focused on outcomes… reporting was regular and clear and the data produced was used systematically.'
'Therefore you can see that performance management is key to delivering a vibrant and effective library service in today’s environment.'
Patterns for Improvement,
Audit Commission, 2003
One of the government’s key aims is to improve the quality of life for people at the local level; libraries can play an important part in achieving this objective. Performance management is not rocket science: it is about taking action in response to actual performance to achieve the goals of the organisation.
Performance management monitors how well services are meeting their objectives and targets, staying within budget and keeping the promises in their statements and plans. The government expects performance management frameworks to be in place for all public services. Performance management is fundamental to the way local government services are run and is an integral part of the Comprehensive Performance Assessment (CPA)/Best Value process.
The government White Paper Strong Local Leadership, Quality Public Services, published in 2001, introduced a revised national performance management framework for local government. The key building blocks of the framework are:
- a coherent set of national priorities;
- stretching targets for achievement of national and local priorities;
- a comprehensive assessment regime.
This framework supports the Best Value process already in place that incorporates reviews of services and the requirement to publish information annually on the council’s performance. In addition, new, whole service, cultural inspections are being piloted, in which public libraries play a key role. These will contribute towards any future CPA inspection.
Performance management is not just about planning, it’s about managing governance as well.
Many of us believe that strategic planning is important – we spend a lot of time on it. Unfortunately, most of our time and money is wasted because the plans are seldom used to guide business planning decisions. There is often a gulf between planning and performance management. Some of the reasons are:
- Vision and strategy not able to be acted on. Often statements have no substance. Developing a clear vision through consulting key stakeholders is vital to establishing a sense of purpose and focus for management performance.
- Strategy not linked to departmental teams and individual goals. Usually teams just go on doing what they have always done.
- Strategy and planning not linked to resource allocation, which is often a separate process based on historical funding allocation.
- Monitoring and evaluation carried out mainly on financial measures and things you can count, e.g. issues/visitor figures. For example, in many library plans you will find statements such as: ‘Libraries will set up x number of new reading groups’. There is no real evaluation other than the existence of that number of reading groups. What is the impact on the individual attending these sessions?
- Plans are mainly input-driven rather than outcomes-based. Recent Audit Commission inspections have emphasised the lack of outcomes providing evidence of the effectiveness of library services.
- Plans are put away in filing cabinets for most of the year!
Service planning
The desire to improve performance management in the public sector already has a rich history. The 1999 Modernising Local Government paper recommended the use of four performance management tools to develop better frameworks and improve services. Although a little dated, these are still relevant to service planning in libraries today. They are:
- European Foundation for Quality Management (EFQM), an organisational improvement framework for assessing strengths and areas for improvement across the spectrum of an organisation’s activities. EFQM is used in Warwickshire County Council as the main business planning tool.
- Investors in People (IIP), a national standard for improving organisational performance by training and developing people to achieve organisational goals.
- Charter Mark – the government’s national standard and quality improvement scheme for excellence in customer service, recently revised to include the effective use of resources.
- ISO 9001 Quality System, a global standard approach for quality management. The standard focus on management processes and documentation in order to meet customer needs and expectations. Areas such as bibliographical services are an ideal candidate for this. I find this approach focuses too much on internal matters.
New performance management tools are evolving all the time. Here at Warwickshire, key tools are our procedures manual and service specification documents, where we set clear procedures and quality criteria for our services.
Planning, planning, planning
Within local government it’s often a case of planning overload. Many organisations think of performance management as a separate process, but it really should be seen as an integral part of the planning process. National policy objectives and the Shared Priorities need to be translated into work programmes for staff at a local level and council priorities embedded in service plans. Planning should be a continual process.
Illustrated in Chart 1 is a typical example of the planning pyramid many libraries are faced with.
In Warwickshire library service, we have recently adopted a three-year planning cycle, so that we can focus more on performance management and evaluating our achievements. Previously, planning processes were based on a 12-month cycle. We were trying to plan for the year ahead while focusing on the plans in hand and trying to achieve our current targets.
Short-term absences and vacancies had a large impact on our plans – taking a longer term view helps us overcome this problem. It is also difficult to assess real impact in very short-term plans.
The service has also created a new post of Quality & Best Value Officer to help move the improvement and performance management framework forward.
Performance measurement in itself is meaningless unless it is linked to a purpose. It is significant only in the context of the planning objectives and desired results.
We need to ask three important questions:
- What do we want to achieve?
- Did we achieve it?
- How do we know that?
We need to define what we want (performance and outcomes) at the start, looking at resources, measures and standards for what we are trying to do. Then plan around this (see Chart 2). This is not always as easy as it sounds.
Setting targets
Library services have traditionally been poor at target setting, a crucial part of good performance management. Effective targets need to be realistic but challenging. There can sometimes be tensions between the visionary and stretching targets, often preferred by elected members, and the more realistic and achievable targets preferred by managers. Targets need to be supported by action plans and clearly identifiable resources. This is where planning comes in (Chart 3).
Planning processes should focus on four interrelated key areas:
Outcomes: Is the library service achieving its objectives, e.g. meeting service standards?
Outputs: What level of service is provided, e.g. visitor figures, number of participants at Homework Clubs?
Processes: What has to be done to deliver the outputs? This is where planning needs to be focused. How are we going to achieve the outputs?
Inputs: What resources are being used to deliver the service, e.g. people, time, money? This should be very closely linked to the planning process.
Here in Warwickshire we are setting local targets for all our libraries and breaking these into manageable targets for individual teams and staff members. For example, increasing issues by 3,000 over the year for a particular library translates into a bite-sized target of an additional 20 issues per day.
Balanced Scorecard
The Balanced Scorecard is a popular framework for managing strategy by linking objectives, initiatives, targets and performance measures across key corporate perspectives.
The most compelling reason for using the Balanced Scorecard approach is that there are more opportunities to link strategic planning to performance outcomes and results. The scorecard helps communicate service and unit objectives to the people and teams performing the work (see Chart 4).
There are many other methods, such as EFQM. The main point is that it is good to have a framework to work within.
There are a number of key steps to performance management that will ensure an effective planning system is in place for your library service (see Chart 5).
However, performance management depends on much more than systems, processes, plans and indicators. Excellence also comes from creativity and innovation and it is important that staff have the freedom to experiment and try different approaches.
Successful performance management needs:
- leaders, managers and staff who see their purpose as continually improving what they do and the service they provide to their communities;
- to incorporate national performance management systems introduced by government;
- to be a central part of the political process.
The recent consultation paper from the Audit Commission, A Modern Approach to Inspecting Services, which outlines how the commission will inspect local public services from 1 April 2005, makes clear that performance management is a key activity for local services. Libraries will be asked: How well does the service manage performance? Are effective performance management arrangements in place to drive and monitor progress, and review impact?
Emphasis is also placed on performance outcomes based on Smart (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-bound) targets. The new-style inspections include ‘light touch’ inspections for high-performing authorities and a more robust inspection for those councils needing to improve more rapidly. This will require library services to radically re-think what information they collect and what difference this makes to their users.
Members should also play an important role in performance management as part of the scrutiny process in local authorities. This should be seen as healthy activity undertaken by politicians to improve services for local people. In Warwickshire we are developing a three-, five- and 10-year vision for our libraries, as part of our Best Value review of the whole service, ‘Building for the Future’. Members are actively involved in this process, sitting in the Members/Officers Steering Group.
Shared Priorities
The priorities are shared by both local and national government. Central and local government have agreed the seven most important areas in which they want to see tangible improvements:
- Raising standards across schools
- Improving the quality of life for children, young people and families at risk
- Promoting healthier communities and narrowing health inequalities
- Creating safer and stronger communities
- Transforming local environments
- Meeting local transport needs more effectively
- Promoting economic vitality of localities
The DCMS has just published a report1 setting out the final conclusions and recommendations of research into developing a performance profile for local authority cultural services. Such a profile is intended to help local authorities:
- demonstrate the contribution that cultural services make to cultural, social, economic and environmental objectives;
- evaluate how well their services are currently performing;
- highlight achievements and service improvements; and
- identify the right actions to support and improve cultural services in the future.
The cultural profile should provide clear and consistent answers to questions about achievement, value for money, and culture’s links to the council’s purpose, ambition and the local context. This should help drive improvement and provide a high-level overview of performance.
This is a critical time for libraries. For more than 150 years, libraries have given pleasure and provided opportunities to learn. It is now time to demonstrate – through effective performance management – that libraries are relevant and inviting to future generations and provide value for money.
Library services need to work in partnership, including the wider cultural and voluntary sector, focusing on the needs of the community and responding to strategic agendas such as Every Child Matters,2 and the focus on the independence and well-being for the increasing elderly population. Inspections will focus on these areas and libraries need to demonstrate delivery.
People, not systems, improve performance and improvements will only happen if people want it and strive for it.
Is your service ready for this challenge?
References
1 Performance Profile for Local Authority Cultural Services. DCMS, 2004.
2 Every Child Matters. Green Paper on framework for inspection of children’s services, 2003.
Ayub Khan is Core Services, Quality and Operations Manager, Library and Information Service, Warwickshire County Council. Ayub has strategic responsibility for performance management within the library service and is a member of the Midlands Performance Management Group.
Updated: 28 April 2005