Appendix Five Effective Partnership Working
Checklist for action Questions for partnership? and for councils, police forces, health authorities arid trusts that are involved in partnership working.
Please pull out and copy
In its management paper, A Fruitful Partnership, the Commission identified a number of factors that can help organisations to decide when to work in partnership and to help partnerships to be effective. They have been translated into a series of questions for partnerships, and for councils, health bodies and police forces that ere involved in partnership working.
These questions have been drawn together into this checklist. The aim of the checklist is to assist partnerships and their members in reviewing their effectiveness.
| Question |
| DECIDING TO GO INTO PARTNERSHIP 1. Does this organisation have clear and sound reasons for being involved in its current partnerships? 2. Where new partnerships must be set up to meet national requirements, what groundwork is being done locally to maximise their chances of success? 3. Are changes in behaviour or in decision-making processes needed to avoid setting up partnerships with only limited chances of success? |
| GETTING STARTED 4. Have all the partnerships in which the organisation is involved been reviewed to evaluate whether the form of the partnership is appropriate to its functions and objectives? 5. Do all the partnerships have an appropriately structured board or other decision-making forum? 6. When setting up a new partnership, how are prospective partners identified? |
| OPERATING EFFICIENTLY AND EFFECTIVELY 7. Do partners share the same main objectives for the partnership? 8. Are the partnership's objectives consistent with those of the partnership organisations? 9. If an outsider watched a partnership operate, would he/she be able to identify the partnership's main objectives? |
| 10. Do the partners know where the boundaries between the activities of the partnership and of their own organisations lie? 11. Do the members of partnership steering groups have sufficient authority to commit their organisations to decisions? 12. Are partnerships prepared to delegate responsibility for parts of their work to particular partners? 13. Do large partnerships have an executive group that all the partners trust to make decisions on their behalf? 14. Are project-planning techniques used to ensure the separate agreement of all the partners to a course of action in good time, when necessary? 15. Do the partnership's decisions get implemented effectively? 16. Are partnership staff selected for their technical competence and for their ability to operate both inside and outside a conventional public sector framework? 17. What actions are taken to build and maintain trust between partners? 18. If members have dropped out of a partnership, what lessons have been learnt about how to maintain involvement in the future? |
| REVIEWING SUCCESS 19. Does each partnership have a shared understanding of the outcomes that it expects to achieve, both in the short and longer term? |
| 20. What means have been identified for measuring the partnership's progress towards expected outcomes and the health of the partnership itself? 21. Has the partnership identified its own performance indicators and set jointly agreed targets for these? 22. Are the costs of the partnership known, including indirect and opportunity costs? 23. Are these costs actively monitored and weighed against the benefits that the partnership delivers? 24. What steps have been taken to make sure that partnership's are accountable to the individual partners, external stakeholders, service users and the public at large? 25. Are some or all of the partnership's meetings open to the public? 26. Is information about the partnership's spending, activities and results available to the public? 27. Does the partnership review its corporate governance arrangements? 28. Has the partnership considered when its work is likely to be complete, and how it will end/handover its work when this point is reached? |