Day 84: Ongoing Performance Review

It’s the time of year when we do our annual ongoing performance reviews with colleagues.  This takes the form of looking back at the previous 12 months and how things have gone compared to the objectives set a year ago.

This is a positive process intended to be an opportunity to celebrate successes as well as understand and learn from the things that didn’t go to plan.  People at Turning Point have achieved a huge amount in the past 12 months, including continuing to deal with the Covid pandemic and providing services to an increasing number of people across England.

Day 66: Performance Vs Outcomes

Organisations use many metrics to judge how well they are operating.  I get frustrated when performance, quality and outcome measures are seen as different things.  As far as I am concerned, if something you’re measuring is not for the purpose of improving outcomes, why are you measuring it?

Efficiency and productivity measures are important, as they can help with improvement leading to release of resources and/or reduction of costs to achieve outcomes.  Outcome measures are the ultimate demonstration of quality.  However, these outcomes need to be set with the person they are the outcomes for and must matter to them!

Day 27: Insight

How do we get insight into service performance?

Einstein said:

“Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted”

We need to clearly define outcomes that people who we support want to achieve; and find ways of measuring this (Quantitatively or qualitatively).  Then we need to use technology to layer this data with other data we hold like incidents, complaints, feedback, benchmarking etc.

Digital tools can present information to us, from which we can then use people to develop into insight.  This isn’t dehumanising the process but using people where they have most value.