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Implementing a Performance Management Framework at Essex Police

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Implementing A Performance Management Framework At Essex Police

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Introduction

With key goals around bringing simplicity to a complex landscape, and improving citizen-facing performance with constrained resources, Essex Police introduced a performance management approach called “Plan on a Page.” A robust, and leadership-driven, communications strategy has been critical in securing buy-in within an organization with a long history of “new” approaches to performance management and measurement.

Simultaneously, a Plan on a Page has been rolled out within the joint Essex Police and Kent Police Support Services and to its seven departments. Key goals here were to drive consistency in performance across the departments as well as bring greater rigor to performance management in the support world.

With almost 6,000 employees serving an estimated population of 1.72 million, Essex Police operates across an area of 1,405 square miles, which borders the counties of Suffolk, Cambridgeshire, Hertfordshire and Kent as well as four London boroughs.

As with all Government agencies in the UK (and indeed across much of Europe) Essex Police is expected to deliver consistently high levels of service in the face of constrained funding (the continuing aftermath of the Credit Crunch). They are faced with the challenge of Doing More with Less, as we titled our recent book.

A New Approach to Performance Management When Essex Police decided to build and implement a strategic performance management system (which it calls Plan on a Page) in 2013, its approach to enterprise performance management was very much shaped by the target-setting demands of central Government. “Historically, our performance management framework has focused primarily on regular meetings to scrutinize numeric data sets, with performance evaluated against targets,” Mark Gilmartin, Director of the Essex Police and Kent Police Support Service, explains. “There was a particular focus on judging success based on daily and weekly data, with longer term trends and contextual information considered less.” He adds that performance management was also focused

heavily on collecting data about crime, with limited focus on, or understanding of other important areas of police business. “This reflected the national policing priorities at the time, and other influences,” he adds.

Introducing the Plan on a Page into Essex Police began with an initiative, led by Gilmartin, to launch it within the about 1100 employee strong Kent and Essex Police Forces Support Services Unit: which delivers shared services to both forces in the areas of Finance, HR, IT, Transport, Procurement, Estates and General Services. “My primary reason for deciding to introduce the Plan on a Page was my observation that performance management is generally underdeveloped in support functions,” explains Gilmartin. “I perceived that this framework could deliver greater rigor and step-change performance improvement in the support world and at a time when it is particularly needed.”

However, early in the journey Stephen Kavanagh, the Chief Constable of Essex Police picked up on the approach and decided to implement it at the corporate level of Essex Police Force. Gilmartin recalls that at the time the Chief Constable (who had relatively recently been appointed to the position) was looking for a framework that could bring simplicity to the understanding of what is a very complex landscape, essentially by being better able to understand performance data within operational and organizational contexts. “He also saw the framework as a vehicle for encouraging innovation and learning, reducing bureaucracy and as something that could help communicate to our various stakeholders what Essex Police aims to achieve as an organization,” explains Gilmartin, who adds that the frameworks promise of less but more meaningful data was also appealing to Kavanagh.

Creating the Plan on a Page In late 2013, Essex Police commissioned Bernard Marr of the Advanced Performance Institute (API) to develop a strategic plan and implementation framework for the force. The design process stretched through Q3 and Q4 of the financial year 2013/14 and went live in Q1 of 2014. Developing the Plan on a Page (which is shown on the next page) began with API conducting a series of one-to- one interviews with the Chief Constable and other Chief Officers and senior managers. The interviews

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fleshed out what the senior team perceived as the key challenges facing the force and what they needed to be good at in order to deliver to citizen- facing expectations.

Following the interviews, a series of workshops with the Senior Officers and senior managers was held where, through an iterative process, the Plan on a Page was developed and, importantly, agreed upon. Note that also useful here was the drawing on lessons learnt from other similar exercises, such as the Plan on a Page created by API client Durham Constabulary (2).

The senior team of Essex Police identified four priority areas, which appear on the Strategy Map: prevention and reduction of crime and harm; solving crime and bringing offenders to justice; deliver quality services and improving customer satisfaction, which together support a Mission to: Uphold the law, Respond to calls for assistance, and Protect people from harm.

Key Performance Questions Following agreement on the key themes and strategic objectives the next step in designing a performance management framework is typically to

move straight to identifying Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). However to provide more rigor to KPI selection, Essex Police introduced the intermediary step of identifying relevant Key Performance Questions (KPQs), a performance improvement intervention pioneered by API and used by a host of other organizations.

To explain: a KPQ focuses on and highlights what the organization needs to know in terms of executing existing strategic objectives. KPQs enable a full and focused discussion on how well the organization is delivering to these objectives and serve as an important bridge between organizational goals and KPIs. Indeed KPQs are used to provide a performance context to KPIs and help to more effectively chose the right indicators.

As an example from Essex Police, the objective, “understanding the policing needs and responding to demand proactively,” is supported by the KPQs. “to what extent are we profiling our demand?” and “to what extent are we responding to our demand proactively?” which in turn are supported by the KPIs, “number and type of calls and incidents (trends)” and “response time by type of incident.”

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As a further illustration, the objective, “strong leadership at all levels,” has the accompanying KPQs of, “to what extent have we got open and honest communication?” “to what extent do people understand the strategic direction and priorities?” and “to what extent do we challenge poor behavior and poor attendance?” identified KPIs are Staff Feedback ‘Strong Leadership’ – measured, among other metics, via focus groups and brief interviews as well as the Absenteeism Bradford Factor (this is based on the theory that short, frequent, and unplanned absences are more disruptive than longer absences and measures appropriately).

Gilmartin describes the value of KPQs. “KPQs provided a more nuanced approach around asking questions to understand whether there was a problem and if so what does the problem look like in practice, rather than simply asking whether performance is red, amber or green,” he says. “KPQs provide clear alignment in understanding the nature of the problem rather than shouting loudest.” He adds that as Essex Police was relatively underdeveloped in performance management using KPQ as a way to better understand what they should be looking at was extremely helpful.

The Benefits of the Process Interestingly, Gilmartin reflects that following a rigorous process of building the Plan on a Page itself delivered significant benefits to Essex Police. “We had a structured approach of conducting workshops at various levels of the organization,” he explains. “A big early win of doing so resulted from the work that was done with the whole of the senior officer team of Essex Police: that they reached consensus as to the strategic performance priorities of the Police Force was critically important in achieving clarity around what we were aiming to achieve and then communicating these priorities.”

Importance of Communication Indeed from the outset the senior team of Essex Police realized that if they were to successfully secure buy-in to this new approach to performance management and measurement it would require a comprehensive communication strategy. As much as anything this was the recognition that adopting the Plan on A Page necessitated an evolution of its performance culture. Early on, API conducted workshops with senior managers explaining the

principles of best practice on performance management.

The communication strategy also included road- shows for operational staff, who included front-line officers from each discipline: neighborhood, public order and firearm officers, etc. This provided them with an opportunity to contribute to the strategic performance conversations and even ask direct questions to the Chief Constable, who personally led the communication effort. “We perhaps over- communicated, but for good reasons as in the Police world front-line people are not used to being fully consulted on strategic matters,” says Gilmartin.

One of these “good reasons,” speaks directly to cultural challenges. Gilmartin explains that within most UK Police Forces (also true in many other countries) there is a not insubstantial amount of cynicism, especially when it comes to anything to do with performance management and measurement. “For many Police officers and staff there’s a response of, “been here before, done it and nothing changed,” he says, stressing that the continued push from the top and continued communications has helped reduce that resistance significantly.

Gilmartin continues that this was especially important right now as UK Police Forces are wrestling with managing with self-generated and externally imposed targets. Therefore it was important to get buy-in to and alignment throughout the organization as to how the force could deliver efficiency gains without compromising, and indeed improving on customer-facing performance (external and internal). “The Plan on a Page is helping us to achieve that difficult balancing act,” he says.

Benefits of the Plan on a Page By using the Plan on a Page, Essex Police identified several useful initiatives around the management of offenders on bail (as the longer bail goes on the less valuable the evidence becomes) which supports the solving crime and bringing offenders to justice priority. Moreover, Essex Police has also been able to drive greater discipline and rigor around optimizing digital opportunities in the aftermath of a crime, amongst other improvements. “Being able to visualize and so manage and measure such areas through the Plan on a Page has certainly helped to deliver tangible performance improvement,” explains Gilmartin.

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Support Services Rollout The Plan on a Page method has also been implemented as the central performance management framework for the combined Essex and Kent Support Services Directorate. The Directorate’s Plan on a Page is shown in the figure below.

Developing the Plan on the Page followed the same rigorous process as for the corporate plan and involved workshops for the heads of the seven departments (HR, Business Services, Finance, Transport, Estates, Procurement and IT) as well as other key staff. The Directorate Plan on a Page was then turned into a more attractive visual to make the communication even easier (see round figure on the right). Support Services has business plans related to customer engagement, processes and staff engagement and the key objectives here are objectives on the Plan on a Page Strategy Map.

The same objective setting, KPQ and KPI process was used to create the Plans on a Page for each of the departments. The Plan on the Page for the IT Department is shown on the next page. Note that ITD, which is true for the other departments has a “mission” that supports the support services mission: “to provide the most cost effective and service leading HR, transport, estates, facilities, finance, procurement and business services to the two Forces and their PCCs”. Moreover, many of the Support Services objectives are also devolved to the departments, such as “Standardize, optimize and continuously improve all our key processes,” “continuously benchmark and compare ourselves to

evaluate and improve our performance,” and engage and communicate with our people. This ensures alignment between what the departments are setting out to achieve and the objectives of the Directorate, which in turn aligns to the corporate objectives of Essex Police (as well as being mapped to the objectives of Kent Police).

Benefits of Alignment “Within support services generally and departments individually, our priority areas are around customer satisfaction, staff satisfaction, improving processes and achieving savings,” explains Gilmartin, who provides this example of the benefits of alignment. “As a result of cascading the Plan on the Page to all seven departments we have been able to put in place a robust and standardized approach to business partnering with customers, through which we can assess how each department is improving against customer satisfaction targets and compare with each other,” he says. “This common approach has enabled a much more mature relationship with customers through which, for example, we may explain why one requested solution can’t be delivered – perhaps for cost reasons - but will research and present possible alternatives. We are doing much more than paying lip service to the conventional business partnering approach.” Amongst the other achievements Gilmartin points to significant improvements in the purchase to pay process and those around the employee lifecycle from hiring through promotion to leaving.

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Future Developments Looking ahead Gilmartin says there is still much to be done at both Essex Police and support service levels, in areas such as strengthening the performance culture, further development of the KPQs and KPIs, and capturing and acting upon the lessons learned to date. Moreover, although the

Plan on a Page has enabled a much improved format for presenting the information in a way that encourages broader discussion about performance (informed by, but not restricted to, the data) and that there is now greater usage of statistical evaluation and longer term trends to provide a more measured view of performance, “As we become more mature in using the performance management framework we will get better at analyzing the data that we collect and in how we present those insights to senior management and others teams so that they have much richer and data-driven performance discussions,” he says. “And in the final analysis it is the quality of the conversations had and the decisions made that counts, not the framework itself.”

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Key Performance Indicators For Dummies by Bernard Marr (2015, John Wiley & Sons)

About

This case study was produced by Bernard Marr, who is the founder and chief executive of the Advanced Performance Institute and James Creelman, who is a fellow of the Advanced Performance Institute and Manager, Knowledge & Research Center at the Palladium Group, Inc.

The Advanced Performance Institute (API) is a world-leading research, consulting and training organisation specialising in organisational performance. The institute provides consulting, training and research on concepts like strategy management, performance management, performance measurement, analytics and big data. Learn more at www.ap-institute.com

Further Reading • API Case Study: Performance Management, Analytics and Business Intelligence: Best Practice Insights

from the Police by Bernard Marr and James Creelman

And check out our website where you can:

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• Browse our extensive Key Performance Indicator (KPI) Library to find the right metrics for your business

• Watch videos on key themes

• Find out about the latest books and read sample chapters

Doing More with Less 2nd edition: Measuring, Analyzing and Improving Performance in the Not-For-Profit and Government Sectors by Bernard Marr and James Creelman (2014, Palgrave Macmillan)

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