Service delivery forms a key part of the corporate governance framework. Management and monitoring of performance have become a vital part of delivering service. Whilst performance indicators give a pointer to the level of performance, it is benchmarking that can pinpoint areas of good or poor performance.

This enables informed targets to be set for performance improvement. Benchmarking services provide the evidence to answer the questions at the heart of Comprehensive Area Assessment (CAA) and its predecessor – Comprehensive Performance Assessment (CPA ):

Benchmarking helps answer fundamental questions such as:

• How are we performing?
• Are we performing better year on year ?
• How does our performance compare with our peer organisations ?
• Can we learn anything from other organisations ?
• Are we providing value for money?

Launched in 1998, CIPFA Corporate Services Benchmarking offers a unique product currently delivered to almost 2,000 members of individual clubs. We continue to have high levels of customer satisfaction and high re-join rates. The strengths that make CIPFA Benchmarking Clubs so successful are:

Comparing like with like – by producing precise definitions of what is being benchmarked and applying data validation techniques to ensure the benchmarks provided are as good a comparison as can reasonably be expected.

Encouraging participation – by the use of member steering groups and review meetings.

Promoting good practice by circulating checklists and monitoring the degree of compliance.

Facilitating exchange of information – by facilitating exchange of information, methods and ideas.

Enabling further process comparison – by supplying the full database of raw data along with an interactive report to all members returning data.

Mapping performance trends – by comparing current and historical performance.

Collating and providing information on quality initiatives – by using the scrapbook section of the questionnaire.

Membership is open to public sector organisations via an annual subscription. This fee covers documentation, data collection, telephone helpline, reports and other feedback and a place at review meetings. We have developed the clubs with a real club ethos. This means that members only get out of the club, what they put in. You cannot purchase data. In order to receive data, you must return data.

Each club questionnaire also has a Scrapbook section where we collect textual and quality information that is compiled for all members and circulated via e-mail. Previously asked questions include information on e-commerce, customer satisfaction, staff retention and recruitment, future departmental developments and the impact of the credit crunch.

Value for money is as much concerned with the quality of services as with their cost. The main focus of our clubs is on benchmarking costs, activity levels and other workload-related measures.

This is not by choice, but simply because it is so difficult to measure and compare quality. Where there are established national indicators for the service, clubs would normally collect these.

Club members agree to respect the confidentiality of all information. To this end our reports only refer to individual members by letters and a key to the names is provided separately, which members are asked not to show to anyone other than their immediate colleagues.

Attendance at steering group meetings and review meetings is approved by CIPFA for CPD purposes and certificates will be available.

Each CIPFA Corporate Services Benchmarking Club operates along the following lines:

A steering committee, formed of experienced volunteers from the relevant service area, determines the scope of the exercise and agrees the questionnaire content.

The questionnaire is circulated and a date fixed by which data has to be returned. Detailed definitions and guidance on completion of the questionnaire are provided, but further help is available from CIPFA Benchmarking.

Returned data is subjected to extensive analysis and validation and a draft report is issued. This often reveals minor inconsistencies and so data revisions are accepted at this stage before final reports are produced.

Two final reports are issued one of which compares all club members (or by organisation type where relevant) and the other compares members with named comparators of their choice.

Each club may also ask textual process type questions, the answers to which are fed back in the form of a scrapbook.

Members supplying data are provided with a database of all the raw data for the club along with an interactive report for carrying out further analysis.

Finally members can attend one of a series of review meetings. These meetings are designed to enable a small group of members to review the benchmarking exercise and discuss matters of mutual concern. The meetings mark the beginning of the transition from the benchmarking of costs to the benchmarking of procedures, systems, organisation structures, quality and value for money.