About the Youth Justice Agency

The Youth Justice Agency was launched as an Executive Agency within the Northern Ireland Office (NIO), as recommended in the Criminal Justice Review 2000, on
1st April 2003.

The principal aim of the Youth Justice Agency is to reduce youth crime and to build confidence in the youth justice system. The Agency works with children aged 10-17 years who have offended or are at serious risk of offending.

A Corporate Services directorate provides a range of support services to these operational strands of the Agency - include the management and delivery of personnel, finance, business planning and information technology functions on behalf of the Chief Executive.

The Challenge

The key challenges faced by the YJA in relation to its corporate strategy were as follows:

• Getting reporting data was taking increasing amounts of time and compiling reports for submission for the Board and its stakeholders was becoming inefficient
• Data consistency was difficult due to the current method of managing that data as well as being able to confirm ownership
• Project Management of YJA projects was not consistent throughout the organization and identifying ownership and providing accountability was difficult
• Lack of a feeling of control due to the dispersed nature of the data sets being held
• Answering Ministerial questions was inefficient and could take up significant amounts of time
• No one consistent way of measuring Key Performance Indicators / some remained unmanaged or monitored therefore providing difficulty with reporting against Corporate Strategies and Business plans
• Visibility to management of all programmes of work and operational work at any one point in time was extremely difficult

Our Solution

Workshops
Cora Systems’ highly experienced consultants commenced the project by running a series of workshops with YJA’s management team to pin point logically the key business drivers that would ensure and enforce correct governance, monitoring and quality delivery of the YJA Corporate and Business plans including validating:

• The strategy against the work in progress
• The organisational structuring
• Ownership / accountability
• The delivery of YJA services

Using ProjectVision
Throughout the workshops ProjectVision was used to model the strategic objectives, organisational structure and work programme within the Agency. On completion this provided the YJA with:

• A programme work structure in line with their Business / Operational work plan i.e. key business areas
• An Organisational Structure based on the YJA Directorates with related projects assigned to show ownership within the structure
• Creation of strategic goals and objectives within the corporate management structure and linked contributing projects
• Tangible tasks to deliver projects and operational work
• Task owners who would deliver the identified tasks
• Creation of KPI structure based on all required KPI groups and KPI’s including target values / assigned to projects if required
• A risk management strategy embedded in system
• Relevant and comprehensive reporting

Benefits to the Youth Justice Agency

By implementing ProjectVision, the YJA have gained control and visibility of the progress of their corporate plan and work involved in delivering it through:

• Project progress reports for project teams and management
• Monitoring and reporting of tangible performance indicators
• Risk management at individual project level with aggregation to programme level if required
• Capability to match skill sets to tasks and ensure correct staff resource assignments based on expertise and experience
• Capability to run reports at staff resource level to view assignments, capacity, and over commitments

This has provided YJA with the ability to close the full circle of reporting between Corporate & Strategic Planning, Business and Project Plans, performance measurements and management and staff ownership requirements ensuring high quality and effective delivery across the full Organisation Structure both vertically and horizontally.