Collaborative Work and Benchmarking

In these difficult times benchmarking gives participants some idea of the scale of savings or improvement that they can make. Process based benchmarking linked to an analysis of the process gives managers the right clues to understand current and potential future performance.

Not everything can be a priority – the management of a service requires that decisions are taken on where to focus limited resources, and which areas need improvement and which are acceptable to be 'good enough'.

That then has to be translated into action through the right kind of customer focused redesign and followed through with the appropriate change techniques.

Importantly collaborative workshop based benchmarking enables questions of definition, and the exploration of reasons behind differences that enables practical decisions to be taken on areas for improvement, and the identification of potential solutions with the benefit of other authorities' first-hand experience.

We have a strong track record in collaborative benchmarking, having worked with over half a dozen Revenues and Benefits departments in the North West, and over 40 planning authorities, having developed the de-facto standard for benchmarking costs – Rough-cut Activity Based costing. Our experience shows that these sessions work best when authorities are unified by a common factor either geographical, structural (e.g. Unitary authorities) or organisational (out-sourced). That said mixed groups enable the exploration of a range of these factors, and key performance factors such as processing rate, and key ratios are applicable regardless of context.