[Paul Dean]

It’s annual staff appraisal time here again and I wonder whether scrutiny managers and officers up and down the nation have been given any interesting personal targets or challenges by their managers that they might like to share on here. The targets I currently have are, in broad outline:

• Undertake team appraisals and hold regular team meetings
• Demonstrate an active understanding of the links between customer focus and productivity/efficiency … to ensure both improved customer focus and improved efficiency (this is a corporate one for all managers)
• Ensure successful project management of scrutiny and best value reviews
• Ensure successful development and management of an ongoing scrutiny review programme
• Help council staff and community organisations better understand the scrutiny process
• Ensure measurable benefits from attending national conferences and events.
• Involve the public more meaningfully in scrutiny projects
• Adapt scrutiny processes in the light of new legislation and emerging good practice

Last year I also had ..

• Submit an entry for the CfPS good scrutiny awards.
But it was dropped this year!

Ideas and inspiration would be most welcome.

Paul Dean
Scrutiny Manager
East Sussex County Council

[Earl Piggott-Smith]

Hi, I would be interested in knowing how realistic some of these targets are for your scrutiny team to achieve and also what's not on your list - holding the executive to account ??

[Paul Dean]

Thanks for that Earl. Interesting issues there.

All the personal targets in my list are realistic and very easy to measure. If someone tried to give me one that wasn’t, maybe something ambiguous, or hard to measure or perverse, then I would object. I guess everyone does.

I suppose the principle I like, to use an analogy, is that that it’s ok to have a target to “buy a lottery ticket” but not one to “win the jackpot”. I know that’s a bit of an ‘input’ type target rather than an ‘outcome’ one but for appraisals isn’t that ok?

I guess therefore there are a number of “jackpot” type, or otherwise problematic, targets thankfully missing from the list, including:

• ensuring scrutiny holds the executive to account
• ensuring that at least X% of scrutiny recommendations are accepted by the Executive
• measuring the effectiveness of scrutiny to demonstrate year on year improvement.

I don’t particularly want to get into a debate here about targets and measures to assess the performance of scrutiny. That is being dealt with in other threads. This is all about individual appraisal targets which all staff have to work with in some form or another. I’m interested in whether others have similar or totally different targets to mine.

Earl, have you got “holding the executive to account” in your personal targets?

[Josh Mynott]

A lot depends on the style of appraisals in your own authority, obviously.
Here, we would tend to focus on fewer targets / objectives (probably 3 or 4 maximum) and focus on things that need particular work or which need to be done differently this year. So, for example, something around responding to legislative change would go in, because it's new and needs a specific piece of work doing on it. Similarly, if we felt there was a problem with public engagement, that could go in as something to improve next year. Some of the others in your list, like the "ensure succesful management of scrutiny work programme" type objectives would be much less likely to go in my list of targets, I think, on the basis that it is our job to do that all the time anyway, so it would inappropriate to make it a specific objective for this year. Unless, of course, in the general discussion about how everything has gone it becomes clear that it was a right mess last year that needs sorting.

But, as I say, I think this is probably a question of house style, and I don't really see any objection to any of the objectives you've been given, if objective setting in your authority takes the form of a general overall review of your work, rather than a more "exception" based system that we have here.

If anyone gets "Holding the executive to account" as a target in their appraisal, you should of course object immediately, given that it's members job to do that, and our job simply to create the conditions to facilitate it.