Improvement Service

Relationships don't always last forever, no matter how good the intentions of the partners. A partnership may have served its purpose or be consistently failing to deliver improvements. It may no longer be helping a member to achieve their objectives or create greater leverage with its resources. Partners need to be alert in recognising and acting on these situations. This document outlines the main challenges in ending a partnership and contains links to further resources.

Trust and respect between partners is critical to the effectiveness of a partnership. This is something that takes time and effort to achieve. This document outlines the key challenges in dealing with lack of trust in a partnership and contains links to further resources.

More and more public agencies are working together to deal with issues and problems that straddle organisational boundaries. They often assume that a new 'partnership' is the best way to help them deliver the expected benefits, leaving some partners with a sour taste in their mouth. There's no doubt that partnerships are hard work and should not be entered into lightly. Agencies should ask themselves the following questions: What added value would we achieve from working together? How closely do we need to work together to deliver these benefits? What structure do we need to support this? The document also includes links to further sources of help.

Fuller thoughts on performance management in partnerships from the Improvement Service.   This paper aims to bring together some of the key learning and research that exists in this area and provide a simple yet effective guide.  Still very much in development shared with a wider group to encourage comment.

Partnerships should make a real effort to specify the outcomes that they are trying to achieve and to measure them effectively. This paper contains guidance on setting clear performance measurements.

Partnerships should establish simple frameworks to help them review and evaluate the performance of specific projects and programmes. They need to interpret the results with care. This paper contains guidance on monitoring and evaluating individual projects and partnership's programme of activities.

Partnerships need to establish a benchmark against which they can measure their achievements and progress. This can only be done if they first collect data which describes their starting point. This paper contains simple guidelines for doing just that.

The agenda of partnership meetings is important - it needs to focus the valuable time of members on issues that can only be dealt with by that group in that format. Anything else should be excluded. This document contains guidance on setting meeting agendas, improving meeting effectiveness and consensus building.

Partnership strategies need to be complemented by action plans which set out clearly what is going to be done, by whom and when, and for what purpose. This document contains guidance on building an action plan.

Partnership action plans need to be reflected in the action plans of the individual partner organisations. This could take the form of policy change, service delivery change or better alignment of staff or money. This paper looks at how it can be done.

There are a number of ways in which organisations can join up resources to work more effectively together. Partnerships should think laterally about improving the way they combine resources. This paper contains lots of examples of joint resourcing.

There is now no argument about the correlation between leadership and partnership performance. Therefore, the choice of leader and the leadership style deployed are important. This document outlines the skills required for leadership and the need for changing leadership styles.

This paper discusses the importance of good governance, areas of governance that partnerships need to be clear on, governance documents and models of accountability. It also contains toolkits and examples of good governance.

With an agreed vision in place, objectives must be developed to drive the partnership forward. This document offers tips on setting objectives using the SMART principle.

Important choices have to be made about how a partnership is structured, the roles of each of the parts, and their accountabilities. This paper offers advice on choosing the right structure, ways of working together and potential pitfalls.