Wednesday, October 04, 2006

Performance Mgt training

Tonight we had a training session on performance management at Merton Council. The session was pretty useful in how we can use the data and to how to go about obtaining the information. Data is now been produced by the Council on a monthly basis, which allows the data for the previous month to be seen on the internal intranet by the third week of the next month. I hope it soon put on the public website and not limited to the internal site.

In any assessing Council service performance, it is only in the last ten years that any kind of framework had been put in place. The job of scrutiny is to look at how the Council is performing and if necessary ask for further information and to challenge poor performance. However, it is also needs to look at other information including resident’s surveys and decisions of the Council in a range of different areas. Of course the best method in my views will always be to get on the knocker and engaging with community on local issues. This is the best method in my view on finding out for yourself views on the Council and I can assure you that I do this on a very regular basis in my ward Pollards Hill.

I think that a realisation does exist in local government that the number of targets does need reducing, some key performance indicators are effectively outside the control of the Council and others I doubt whether the performance indicators are really relevant and are of much overall use.

At the training session we also had somebody from the Idea, this is a very useful body that promotes improvement and development in local government and learning from best practice. A very useful publication has been written by the Idea on performance management and I would recommend reading through the document as getting a grasp of our whole performance management function is never the easiest of tasks. While the session was useful it was filled with gobbledygook and getting round all the acronyms we use is a task in itself. I have attached a link to the Idea website, www.idea.gov.uk

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