Performance
Beyond Best Value The Corporate Improvement Team
Best Value at its most
basic, is the improvement of services to our customers. The Council
drives improvements to its services through best value reviews and
originally the Best Value Unit was initially established to do just
this.
As the Council changes, so has the role of the
unit. Whilst advice and guidance to undertake the reviews remains
important, all of the council's services also need support and
guidance to find improvements outside of the reviews and to carry
on where the reviews finish.
This encourages a more integrated approach to
service improvement. It is because the Council is keen to continue
to improve that there became a need for a corporate support unit,
and therefore the Performance Improvement Unit was established. In
2006 the Council renamed the unit 'Corporate Improvement Team'
to reflect the corporate support functions also carried out by the
team. Here are our responsibilities:
- Providing information through research that can
help services to improve, and developing this into tangible service
improvements e.g. identify areas of best practice from within and
beyond the Council.
- Encourage knowledge sharing for effective
service delivery
- Provide an informal consultancy service e.g.
questionnaire design and analysis.
- Work across traditional 'service based'
boundaries to address crosscutting issues.
- Develop appropriate Local Performance
Indicators, building databases of comparative information and
develop service benchmarking.
- Promotion and implementation of Performance
Management throughout the Council.
- Continued support to services undertaking
reviews, as well as those services preparing for and that have
already completed Best Value Reviews.
- Develop and implement the Council's consultation
strategy ensuring services are well informed of priorities and
standards expected by its stakeholders.
- Facilitating service improvement across the
Council.
- Provide project management support to officers
of the Council
The Office of National Statistics have released
key statistics for local authorities which includes information on
ethnicity, religion, health, housing, people and places. A profile
of Allerdale can be viewed on the
national statistics
website.
Allerdale Borough Council
