How you end up structuring your programme will depend on your organisational structure and the types of changes you are hoping to make. However, there are some key elements to include in your plans to set yourself up as best as possible. These include: milestones, team & resources, metrics, governance and risks. Some examples of how other LAs considered milestones, metrics and risks are explored below.
Context: A large city council was incorporating their diagnostic findings into their wider SEND transformation strategy and their programme had some distinct phases: set up, design, trial, rollout and sustain the change.
What they did: They were able to build milestones around these key stages, the school terms and their existing governance forums. Milestones should be significant stages or events in the development of your changes rather than smaller or ongoing activities. They had clear owners for each workstream so incorporated who was responsible for each milestone.
KPIs examples: It is important to think about your leading and lagging indicators! Sometimes called KPIs, these are used to track progress of workstream and you should have expectations of where we want those indicators to be at key milestones. For example, a workstream trying to improve the effectiveness of transition services in order to support children in the settings closest to their communities could have a lagging indicator of number of children supported in their local mainstream school, whilst the leading indicator (the one that gives you an early indication of whether the change is working) could be % of people utilising the new transition service and average parent/carer satisfaction score of new transition service.
Any programme has risks and it is important to think through as many of these as possible before beginning any changes to help minimise the potential disruption to your plan. It is also important to keep risks updated throughout your implementation and ensure senior decision makers have full visibility of them. When thinking through risks and potential mitigations, it can be helpful to pull on knowledge from others who have completed similar changes before. Identifying interdependencies is also an important facet of programme architecture to ensure that when multiple workstreams are taking place, overlapping streams have a clear sequence of diagnostic tasks to conduct to ensure each area is working coherently.
Context: Below gives an overview of how a metropolitan borough completed their initial risk assessment across some of their workstreams they identified through the DBV programme.
What: Their focus was on capacity within the services they needed to deliver the changes they had planned. In some cases, the mitigations focused on effective planning and communication to mitigate this risk, in others it was about seeking funding to support extra capacity and ensuring this is accounted for in the resource plan. They expected these risks (and others) to continue to develop as their implementation began and therefore included the monitoring in their overall governance.
