Back in the office, back on PM

After a lovely two weeks off work, I’m back in the office and freezing. I think the heat must have been turned off the whole time and my extremities are now cold and stiff. All of my colleagues are blowing on their cupped hands in an effort to maintain enough warmth in their fingers to type.

The office pot plants

I won’t spend this post ruminating on last year’s glories or predicting the future for local government improvement in the New Year, but I am getting quite excited about what the next year will hold.  I’ll be doing more on social media and local government, but I’m still not sure what exactly.  I’ve been talking to folks about it and plan to talk to a few more in the weeks to come.

I’ll also be making a return to the world of performance management.   I spent years on a PM project – the Performance Management, Measurement and Information project which the IDeA ran jointly with the Audit Commission – but I’ve also been away from it for a couple of years.    And during that time, the Performance Management Community of Practice has become the second largest IDeA supported community of practice (beaten only by Policy and Performance, its parent community), the old PMMI discussion forums on IDeA Knowledge are still some of the most active on the site, and the PM resources that I developed (with content from PMMI colleagues) are still some of the most visited.   But although the principles remain sound, a lot of the content is now dated – the examples are a little old.  It no longer completely fits the bill in terms of the challenges that are facing local government and their partners in the public sector, PM in partnership, integration of local information, customer insight and greater user feedback in PM.

We won’t be gearing up with a big project on PM like we did before, but we will be looking at how we can gather knowledge across the sector.    As a start and with the help of Dave Briggs, we’ve set up a social learning space that we’ll be using at two seminars in January and beyond.   Don’t go and visit www.ideaperformance.com just yet (’cause it’s still pretty much empty) – but it won’t be long before we should have some great content there.  I can’t wait to start building and sharing.