Organisations and programs can only be held accountable for the customers/clients they work with.
For organisations and programs, the performance measures focus on whether clients are better off as a result of your services. These performance measures also look at the quality and efficiency of these services.
Performance result/outcome: a condition of wellbeing for families, children and communities that you provide a service to.
Performance measure: a measure of how well a program, organisation or funded service is achieving their desired performance result/outcome e.g. increased parents/carers engagement with their child/children.
Three types of performance measures
RBA asks 3 simple questions to establish performance measures:
- How much did we do?
- How well did we do it?
- Is anyone better off?
From talk to action
The following set of questions provides a guide for establishing performance accountability.
Seven performance accountability questions
- Who are our clients? (Purpose, customers/client group)
- How can we measure if our clients are better off? (Customer/client results)
- How can we measure if we are delivering services well? (Quality measures)
- How are we doing on the most important of these measures? (Headline measures – baseline data and story)
- Who are the partners that have a role to play in doing better? (Partners)
- What works to do better, including low-cost and no-cost? (Research/evidence)
- What do we propose to do? (Action plan)