Capital Ambition’s Efficiency Challenge
Capital Ambition, the Regional Improvement and Efficiency Partnership for London, is developing what I think is a really exciting and ground breaking efficiency peer challenge programme. The IDeA of course pioneered the concept of peer review but this programme, which is being activity supported by the IDeA, breaks new ground.
Encouraging peer working is a central feature of the IDeA mission and perhaps more than anything else the Agency is known for its peer reviews. Essentially this involves politicians and managers from around local government reviewing the performance of individual councils against a benchmark which relates to overall or specific service performance. The IDeA manages the process, including the development of the various benchmarks, recruitment of peers and the management of the specific peer review engagements. The enduring success of the approach and its progressive adoption by other parts of public sector, is a testament to the value of review by sympathetic and informed colleague practitioners. The intensity of the reviews themselves untaps a resource, perhaps based on mutuality and a sense of shared responsibility, not available to the more traditional consultancy approach to performance review.
Capital Ambition have taken the concept of mutuality a step further and, in the efficiency space, this means all London boroughs agreeing to have an efficiency challenge over the period of a year. Mutuality also means senior officers volunteering themselves for peer “duty” over the period of the programme. This is a Capital Ambition initiated and managed programme but given its potential for use elsewhere the IDeA is supporting it as much as it can.
Its important to note that Capital Ambition are calling the peer engagements “challenges” and not “reviews”. This aim is to be challenging with peers being even tougher than they would be in a peer review. Rather than help each other identify areas for performance improvement the aspiration of the peer challenge is help councils, as part of their efficiency programme, deliver real cashable savings.
The challenge, and the aim of real cashable savings, means that a different sort of benchmark is needed. Working with the Society of London Treasurers a “notepad” has been developed which identifies each key area of spend, defines the sort of practice they would expect to see in that area and the metrics associated with that practice. Before each challenge London councils will assess their performance against the notepad (”the self-assessment”) and this self assessment will then be unpicked (in a friendly way) by peers in the challenge engagement.
The programme is groundbreaking in a number of ways but its the potential around notepad which is particularly exciting for me. To be contemporary all benchmarks have to be maintained (otherwise we are benchmarking yesterday’s practice) and although the Society of London Treasurers provide the ideal starting point, the aim of Capital Ambition, working with the IDeA, is to turn the notepad into a really dynamic tool which will be constantly refreshed. The requirement for constant practitioner based refresh takes the initiative right into the heart of the IDeA’s evolving approach to knowledge management strategy particularly the COP initiative.
Partly based on the Capital Ambition concept the IDeA has been able to secure funds from the CLG for an efficiency knowledge hub and we are now working together to understand how we can make the notepad the dynamic centre piece of that hub. The most obvious input will be the challenges themselves each of which will provide a reality check on its existing value and new practice. As well as defining best practice engagement through the peer community the notepad/hub should provide a basis for developing next practice and innovation. This could involve, for example, the identification of a common obstacle and some sort of shared endeavor to overcome this obstacle. The shared endeavor could be a common investment or it could be agreement to seek a regulatory change or a cost saving change in procedure by a government department.
A key feature of the opportunity provided by the Capital Ambition Efficiency Challenge is its scale. A significant group of similar councils are having the same challenge in a fairly tight time frame. The scale makes the maintenance of a dynamic benchmark worthwhile and generates the potential for a really rapid development of ideas (a buzz!). While no one wants to run before they can walk there seems the obvious potential to enhance the value of the programme as a whole by adopting it in other parts of the country.
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Another component for the Efficiency Hub project I believe. I’d like to know more about the ‘notebook’ interface. Also, and if possible, I’d like to rename the Efficiency Hub to ‘The Knowledge Hub’.
[...] need to have artificially invented for them. I was prompted to think of it again recently when I read and talked to John Hayes at the IDeA about the plans being made at capital ambition. What follows [...]
Richard makes some really helpful points and raises some issues. I found the definition of purpose particularly spot on as well as the lessons learned. The fact that the self assessment will not look after itself and has to be managed is critical. This might be part of the wider lesson we are having to grapple with as we move from Web 1, where its about publication, to Web 2, where its about ongoing dialogue and conversation.
The challenge around what is a benchmark and what isn’t is also important. We certainly do use the term in a loose way within the IDeA. It will be interesting to see, as the Capital Ambition programme develops, how “tough” the comparator challenge will get.
One of the opportunities provided by the Capital Ambition programme is the “critical mass” of 33 London boroughs. The “benchmark” will be developed and updated through its application in the peer challenge process. I think the PAS self-assessment is great but the reward for the effort associated with going through it is limited by the fact that only a limited number of councils could be persuaded to make that effort. The more councils who use it (”critical mass”) the bigger the reward for each of the participants. I guess this is just another manifestation of Richard’s key point “it will not run itself”