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THE LOCAL GOVERNMENT IN SCOTLAND ACT 2003
COMMUNITY PLANNING: ADVICE NOTE 6
Building Organisational Capacity
MARCH 2004
Introduction
Community Planning challenges traditional ways of working and delivering services. It requires the development of new attitudes, behaviours and competencies that underpin joined-up policy development, effective partnership working and engagement with communities. It places new demands on Community Planning partners as organisations at all levels, from key decision-makers to people working at the point of service delivery. It also involves building up the capacity of communities to become fully engaged in Community Planning processes.
This Advice Note focuses on organisational capacity building issues. It draws on the study commissioned on behalf of the Community Planning Task Force, " Capacity Building for Community Planning. Readers concerned with community capacity building are referred to Advice Note 5: Effective Community Engagement".
Capacity Building Requirements
For Community Planning to be truly embedded within each partner organisation, it will be important to encourage partners to learn and develop together at the Community Planning level, with the impetus for such change coming from the top. Local authorities, in facilitating the Community Planning process, have a particularly important responsibility in ensuring that building up partners' capacities for Community Planning proceeds in a co-ordinated, effective and efficient manner.
The capacity building study suggests that two parallel approaches are required:
- Addressing the cultural and institutional barriers that constrain collaborative working, including such issues as career and organisational incentives for collaborative working.
- Ensuring that capacity building for Community Planning forms an integral element of each partner's business and organisational development plans and processes, with reference to developing the relevant values, attitudes, behaviours, knowledge and skills.
Given that partners and partnerships are at different stages of development, it is highly unlikely that any one single training programme will capture the range of capacity building needs. Any capacity building work must be flexible and learner centred, and it must promote a considerable degree of local ownership in capacity building requirements for Community Planning.
Approaches and Methods
Community Planning partnerships can draw on a wide range of approaches to building up their capacity, and these could include any of the following:
- Induction for new staff / elected members / appointed chairs etc.
- Networking.
- Awareness raising.
- Secondments and shadowing.
- Management processes such as performance review or appraisal systems.
- Selection criteria for the appointment of staff.
South Lanarkshire Skill Sharing Protocol Early on in the process, partners recognised that as Community Planning developed, there would be an increasing requirement to carry out joint working. This would involve the flexible movement of staff across partner agencies. This could be in response to short-term policy development, or could involve secondments to inter-agency teams e.g. Social Inclusion Partnerships. The Personnel Forum, which is a sub-group of the South Lanarkshire Community Planning Partnership, prepared a skill sharing protocol which will facilitate the easy movement of staff from one partner organisation to another. The protocol covers skill sharing, job shadowing and executive placement. By highlighting areas of common agreement, contractual discussions can focus on specific aspects where negotiation is required. This reduces the time taken in drawing up a contract of employment. For more information see www.southlanarkshire.gov.uk |
Partner organisations will want to review their own internal structures, business planning and other processes for example, financial or information systems to ensure that these contribute to, rather than hinder, partnership working. These measures may all be used to reinforce the skills required to engage in productive external relationships. Such measures will be particularly important in large, complex and multi-departmental organisations such as Health Boards and local authorities.
Measures to ensure each agency is playing an effective role in Community Planning should not be a 'one-off' exercise. There should be continuous action to ensure that each partners' capacity to work effectively in partnership is monitored, reviewed and improved on an ongoing basis. A range of toolkits that may assist partners in this process have been identified in Communities Scotland/Community Planning Task Force research " Assessment of Partnership Toolkits".
Support for Capacity Building
While capacity building for community planning will form part of the "core business" of partners, the Scottish Executive has recognised the need for initial pump-priming funding to help kick-start the process. Some 1 million was distributed to local authorities on behalf of Community Planning partnerships in the financial year 2002/03. Briefly, most CPPs used at least some of the resources for training, including identifying needs, auditing current training provision, developing tailored approaches and establishing joint support/capacity building teams. Resources were also used to improve communication and information with the development of: websites, intranets and databases; communication strategies and implementation; information sharing; leaflets; a joint funded CP communications officer; and support for general seminars to inform about CP, themed events, public conferences. A more detailed analysis can be found at www.communityplanning.org.uk with other papers prepared for the Community Planning Implementation Group.
There is additional funding available for developing the capacity of Community Planning partnerships of around 400,000 in financial year 2003/04 and 300,000 in 2004/05. The Executive is currently looking at how these further tranches might best be distributed.
Links / other reading
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