The Client
Perth and Kinross are ranked 5th in Scotland in terms of area and 14th in terms of population. It is made up of 12 wards and has a population of 140,190. 

Perth and Kinross has experienced one of the highest population growths in Scotland placing increasing demands on their services and infrastructure.  The council has prioritised a number of areas for development through the council’s service areas. 

This necessitates better management and control of their services areas and the accountability of the work of the council at various levels to internal management, elected representatives and indeed, the general public.

The Challenge
The key challenges facing Perth and Kinross Council included:

• Management of performance of council
• Measurement of the effectiveness of the programmes of work implemented by the council, including Corporate Plans, Service Plans, Community Plans and now the Single Outcome Agreement
• Visibility of relevant stakeholders to performance and project information regardless of location, directorate or position
• Maintaining a consistent framework for all relevant staff to project manage their projects effectively and efficiently
• Maintaining a consistent framework to manage all KPI’s including Statutory, Internal, Ad-hoc and Single Outcome Agreement indicators
• Report generation to Chief Executive and other key Directorate staff
• Elected member reporting
• Management, Control and Reporting on the Single Outcome Agreement
• Updating information to Audit Scotland and comparing the Performance of Perth and Kinross Council to those of its peer councils
• Significant amount of time was taken to gather information from relevant staff to generate reports

The Solution
Perth and Kinross chose to take an integrated approach to the solving of the above problems. It was aware that it needed a measurement tool to manage the all the various KPIs that it was obliged to track by Audit Scotland and additionally its own internal indicators to measure the performance of its directorates and service areas.

It was also aware that it needed a Programme and Project Management toolset to manage and report on the various programmes of work and initiatives to implement its Corporate Plan and other plans under the remit of the council such as Community Plan and Single Outcome Agreement.

Having carefully weighed up its options Perth and Kinross Council decided to implement ProjectVision from Cora Systems.  ProjectVision is a Programme, Project and Performance Management System all self contained in one easy-to-use web-based system.

ProjectVision allowed the Performance Management side of the council to easily:

• Set up KPI’s against various initiatives (Corporate Plan, Single Output Agreement, etc)
• Set targets for these KPI’s
• Update information against these KPI’s
• Report in a variety of formats, as required by Chief Executive, Elected members, Internal Management and Teams and the general public
• Compare Perth and Kinross KPIs to national indicators and see where they are in respect to other peer councils.

ProjectVision allowed the Programme and Project Management side of the council to easily:

• Set up Programmes of work with multiple projects rolling up into hierarchical programmes
• Provide true Project Management (not just a list of tasks) that follows the Prince2 methodology.  This provides Project Initiation Documents, Work-Breakdown Structure, Gantt Chart, Risks, Issues and Reporting views.
• Have project templates set-up for standard repeatable type of projects
• Get information on the progress of projects in any service area, literally at the click of a button
• Monitor the performance of initiatives by linking KPIs with project actions (e.g. % complete, resources, due dates, etc)

The Implementation
Cora Systems by their nature are a project management company.  This has helped ensure implementation and delivery and also provided on-going support for Perth and Kinross.  Key points which are important here are:

• Cora Systems have their own project management methodology to implement the ProjectVision solution.  This was tailored for maximum effectiveness and to provide a quick return on Investment for Perth and Kinross Council
• Customised training, aimed at roles rather than a generic across-the-board training course, provided better take up
• A train-the-trainer approach where an internal trainer was able to roll-out training to other users has been proven effective and actually increased take-up of ProjectVision within the service areas
  
  

Find out more about ProjectVision's Performance Management capability