London Development Agency Best Value Review
Rocket Science was asked by the London Development Agency (LDA) to design and conduct the first ever Best Value Review of the Economic Development Strategy for London. As part of the Greater London Authority, the LDA is the only one of the nine Regional Development Agencies in England required under local government legislation to follow a programme of Best Value reviews.
The Review required a detailed assessment of the impact and effectiveness of the current Economic Development Strategy, Success through Diversity, from the perspective of key partners and stakeholders across London. Our approach was built around the organizing principles of the Best Value process, commonly referred to as the '4 Cs' (challenge, consult, compare and compete).
Working with a small internal project group, we designed a series of bespoke benchmarking and impact assessment tools in order to capture and interpret stakeholders' assessments of the Strategy's effectiveness. Consultations were held with the LDA's Charter Partners, a sample group of London Boroughs as well as focus groups with regeneration practitioners across the capital. The Improvement Plan and Recommendations, accepted by the LDA Board in the summer of 2003, has had a significant impact on the preparation and consultation on the new Economic Development Strategy for 2004-7, Sustaining Success.
Since working with the LDA on the Best Value Review, Rocket Science has refined and e-enabled the Scorecards which initially comprised the EDS Best Value Toolkit. Web-enabled, interactive versions of the Scorecards are designed to monitor the delivery of the new EDS and support the LDA's performance management framework by identifying and sharing best practice across London's regeneration community.
The E-Scorecard provides a user-friendly and intuitive monitoring/performance management tool which:
- communicates the LDA's expectations of partners and key managing agents for delivering its priority programmes and interventions
- allows each of the key LDA-funded partnerships/programmes to benchmark themselves against this expectation, identify their key development tasks and assess their progress over time
- enables the LDA to identify and link the issues facing different programmes/projects and to identify appropriate forms of support and learning opportunities which will raise performance
- encourages and helps the Agency's delivery partners to identify and consult with others across London to learn from other approaches/best practice or to identify others facing the same issues and working together to deal with these
- gives the LDA the means to assess the performance of the EDS by capturing key stakeholders' feedback on a regular, confidential and systematic basis.
‘Your report is an excellent record of the morning's discussion, which makes all the difference in getting lasting benefit from it. And yes, your self-assessment questionnaire does shed interesting light on where we started from.’ Senior Policy Manager, Greater London Authority, on a GLA/LDA workshop facilitated by Rocket Science, May 2003