What is your organisation's story?
- Clients are wanting to improve the clarity around their strategic frameworks
This year we have found ourselves providing advice to a larger number of clients on their ‘strategic stories’, and their performance frameworks.
Our work has involved helping clients to define the outcomes they are aiming to achieve, to explain clearly and concisely the ‘line of sight’ between these outcomes and their activities, and to identify suitable measures that provide insight into their progress in a way that informs decision-making.
This focus on frameworks is generally driven by the need to produce a range of accountability documents as part of the annual planning and reporting cycle. Clients are becoming increasingly focused on this, partly because of the emphasis on value for money, but also because the Office of the Auditor-General is upping the ante on accountability frameworks.
Whatever the reason, we have been able to help a diverse range of clients tell their story in a clear and compelling way, including Tourism New Zealand, PHARMAC, Maritime New Zealand, and Land Information New Zealand.- Aren’t these just a compliance exercise?
While these frameworks are often seen as a compliance exercise, we don’t think they should be. A good framework is a clear, coherent and integrated story about what an organisation is trying to achieve, what it is doing to achieve it, and how it will know whether it is succeeding. Done well, it can help clarify strategic direction and focus, and provide key information that a management team needs to refine strategy and keep track of progress. For example, it can assist with:
• Communication: explaining to staff and stakeholders how the different functions and activities fit together coherently to create the desired results
• Clarity of thinking: clarifying outcomes and developing a shared view amongst staff and stakeholders on which outcomes matter.
• Tracking progress: defining the right measures to track progress towards outcomes, to inform learning, evaluation, and decision-making
• Developing strategy: providing a stable ‘structure’ within which to develop strategy – the outcomes framework remains reasonably stable over time, but specific goals and priorities change in response to a changing environment, new issues and learning.
• Accountability/demonstrating value for money
But this means they need to be useful and practical, not a tick-box exercise.- How do we approach performance frameworks?
The ‘usefulness’ principle underpins our approach in this area. It goes without saying that these performance stories need to meet the requirements of the Public Finance Act. But they fundamentally need to be a useful tool for running the business more effectively and efficiently. In our experience, if you start from this perspective, the resulting product is more than likely to meet the formal requirements anyway.
Because of this focus on what works best for your organisation, we don’t think that a one-size-fits-all framework is necessarily right for everyone. Our experience shows that there are a range of ways of telling the story that best meet different needs. Our distilled experience can help guide you towards an approach that works for you.
We also prefer to work in partnership with you to develop these performance frameworks. After all, they are your stories, not ours. We can guide you through the different stages of the development process. Through the course of these conversations, we generally find that our clients gain a better, clearer understanding of their strategic focus. This is a benefit that endures beyond the production of an accountability document.
We also have the range of skills and experience within MartinJenkins to help you join up your strategic frameworks to effective monitoring and evaluation, and to decision-making processes.
