Performance Management
You face constant tension between meeting externally mandated performance targets and understanding what’s actually happening in your service. While reporting to the DfE, Ofsted, YJB, or your senior management is essential, these measures don’t always tell you what you need to know about service effectiveness.
EO helps you navigate this challenge by teaching and applying comprehensive, easy-to-use performance management frameworks that ensure outcomes for service users underpin all your measures—including those focused on budgets and human resources.
Frameworks We Like:
Mark Friedman’s ‘Results-Based Accountability™’
Results-Based Accountability is a disciplined way of thinking and taking action that helps improve quality of life in communities and the performance of programs and services. The framework starts with ends—what do we want? and works backward to means—what will it take to get there?
RBA distinguishes between two levels of accountability: Population Accountability (improving conditions of well-being for whole communities, where responsibility is shared by multiple partners) and Performance Accountability (measuring how well individual programs, agencies, and service systems serve their customers)
The population versus performance distinction is what separates RBA from all other frameworks—it clearly determines who is responsible for what, preventing organizations from being held accountable for community-wide outcomes they cannot control alone, while ensuring they are accountable for the impact on the customers they directly serve
Steve Montague’s ‘Three Rs of Performance’
The Three Rs of Performance is a simple conceptual framework for balanced performance management that focuses on three key areas: Resources (the time, money, energy, and types of resources invested), Reach (the breadth and depth of clients, groups, or populations served), and Results (the impact on those reached—the value-added that makes clients better off)
The Three Rs prevents the common management trap of over-focusing on any single dimension of performance. Public sector organizations that focus only on budget efficiency (Resources) may reduce service quality or exclude hard-to-reach populations. Those obsessing over volume of clients served (Reach) may spread services too thinly to create meaningful impact. And those prioritizing only service quality (Results) may create excellent outcomes for small numbers while failing to meet wider population needs or exhaust their budgets unsustainably. The framework forces balanced decision-making across all three dimensions—ensuring you serve enough people, well enough, within available resources
These frameworks work independently of your existing obligations and help you understand the real story behind your data. Services commonly modify their work and data capture after exploring these approaches—we can support the change management required to implement these improvements. They also lend themselves very well to visualisation in Business Intelligence dashboards.
Software Integration Support
We can also drive discussions with your software suppliers to ensure the data needed to support these frameworks is easy to capture and extract, making performance management a tool for improvement rather than just compliance.
Whether you’re designing a new service, commissioning software, or trying to understand what your data is really telling you, EO can help.
