The Council is improving its entire performance management system, to focus on delivery of the Council’s priorities. A clear “golden thread” now runs from top to bottom.

The Council has recently overhauled the service planning and corporate planning system, to sharpen it, reflect the new structures, and build a stronger “golden thread” between the vision & priorities of the Bournemouth Partnership and the Council, into the plans and targets in the Corporate Plan, through the supporting Service Plans for business Units, and into the targets set for individuals through the Performance and Development Reviews.

The Medium Term Financial Strategy has been in place for several years, but has been strengthened, and extended to five years

Asset Management has a strong basis to deal with both capital disposals, backlog maintenance, and new and improved assets. The Asset Management regime was shortlisted for Beacon status recently

Service and Corporate Planning is being brought forward in the year, to align with the financial target setting and budget setting

Corporate Directors set planning guidelines and templates to get consistent approaches across Business Units, and ensure proper provision is made for corporate initiatives, cross-cutting issues such as crime and disorder, equality and diversity, and customer focus; and to ensure that the Council’s priorities for service improvement are vigorously addressed.  Plans are reviewed by the Corporate Management Team and revisions required to meet the Council’s needs.

Efficiency (Gershon) is a mainstream part of the business planning process

A “balanced scorecard” is used by the Corporate Management Team to monitor progress on Key Performance Indicators under the headings of Customer, Staff, Community, and Finance, and to take action where deviations from plan arise. The CorVu system is being introduced to give a stronger grip on performance management.

A regular customer satisfaction survey is being put in place.

We are striving to instil a culture of performance improvement throughout the authority, to ensure that performance is effective both as a framework and as a culture. To this end we have begun a program to develop awareness around performance. This program involves:

• Externally facilitated development sessions for our managers around how we develop outcomes through performance management (scheduled for December 2005, February 2006 & April 2006)
  
• Investment in new performance management monitoring software. This has been purchased and work has begun on the planned implementation of our new performance management system.
  
• The completion of a data collection template that captures in-depth information around the performance of an indicator.

 The new approach and timescales are still under development, and review, and not yet fully embedded