Benchmarking

Local authorities are increasingly being pressed for further efficiencies and improvements by central government, external inspection regimes, internal priorities and the needs and expectations of local citizens. As a result many local authorities look to active benchmarking to give them good quality information upon which to make decisions about the delivery of high quality services against a backdrop of budget constraints and financial pressures.

LCS consultants have an excellent track record in delivering long term comparative data analysis, discrete benchmarking exercises and those which have formed part of larger projects and have made positive contributions to service improvement. For example:

  • Two of our consultants have been working at intervals with the first care trust in the UK since 2006. The Trust required a review of their social care services with respect to financial expenditure and performance measured both over time (trends) and against their closest ‘neighbours’ and required advice and interpretation on the data provided. The project also involved the engagement of key staff and sharing skills and knowledge with internal staff to enable them to undertake the analyses, using the model we developed.  LCS were called back in 2008 to repeat the exercise and to provide an analysis on progress since the first intervention

And since March 2009 we can  offer, using our partnership with CorVu systems, which provides Performance Management and Business Intelligence solutions for mid – to large-sized companies throughout the world, an easy way to view an organisation’s current performance, linking strategy and key business drivers, so that organisations can proactively improve their service delivery.

CorVu is used by around 50 local authorities and has a large presence in the private and not-for-profit sectors.  It provides the US Army, which has over 50,000 registered users and a staff of over a million, with an effective performance management system, and is equally useful to smaller organisations with as few as six employees, for example by a large number of registered social landlords in the UK.

Phase One of our work to introduce the  performance management system CorVu into Oldham Council has begun with the first Project Board meeting on 11 December 2009.  This is the first implementation of CorVu’s performance management suite into a local authority for LCS since we signed a partnership agreement with Rocket Software (CorVu’s parent company) earlier in the year.  It is hopefully the start of an 18-month programme that would place Oldham at the forefront of performance management and provide councillors and the public with current information about the council and its partners.  Our agreed approach, however, is also to use the implementation as a key tool to implement culture change to focus on the use of performance information to effect improvement and to develop and support staff in this change programme.

We haveused CorVu to:

  • Help a Berkshire local authority easily and quickly capture data using CorVu on recycling to the detailed level of each collection round and each ward. Our resulting report identified which wards needed encouragement to recycle and allowed the local authority to target these accordingly. This saved time and resources and improved value for money in their marketing and publicity.
  • Deliver an options appraisal for CorVu as a corporate performance management tool for a north west unitary authority and prepare a phased implementation plan detailing the core deliverables and key milestones.

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