Step 2: Agree criteria on which to self-evaluate

Choosing the detailed elements for self-evaluation:   Once you’re together with the new group, carry out the following steps:

  • Inform them about STEP 1: process and recommendations, if any, from the prior discussions regarding the focus on the self-evaluation. Get feedback on these.
  • Then agree the specific areas of activity that you will focus on: Decide, if this has not already been discussed, whether you wish to examine, say, a specific geographical area, or specific target groups, or specific areas of work or delivery.
  • Choose the Quality Indicators you will use: What questions will you want to ask about the work that’s going on?  Quality Indicators are really just a set of questions for you to choose from.  If you do not already know which ‘Quality Indicators’ (QIs) you wish to use, choose those that relate most closely to your broad areas of activity chosen for self-evaluation (See Resource 1 for an outline of the QIs in HGILDIOC). This is an important step.  For more detail about some of the most frequently-used  HGILDIOC QIs, see Resource 2 .
  • Limit the total number of QIs to what you feel is appropriate and manageable.  Don’t get carried away! It’s OK to just look at even one
  • Check that there are not pieces of work being ‘left out’ because they involve ‘cross-overs’ of teams or areas or functional groups of staff.

From this point on, it is assumed for simplicity that you will be using HGILDIOC as the framework for your self-evaluation process.

Then move on to Step 3…

USING HGILIOC

The HGILDIOC framework is based on six high-level questions, which encompass the key dimensions of CLD:

  1. What key outcomes have we achieved?
  2. How well do we meet the needs of our stakeholders?
  3. How good is our delivery of key processes?
  4. How good is our operational management?
  5. How good is our strategic leadership?
  6. What is our capacity for improvement?

Each of these high level questions cover a number of ‘performance indicators’ (PIs) and ‘quality indicators’ (QIs), together with a range of ‘themes’, that tell us which aspects of a CLD service we should look at in order to answer the questions.

Drilling down further into the framework, each PI, QI, and ‘theme’ also has a number of ‘Challenge Questions’ to help look even more closely, together with some illustrations that can help us judge the quality (the strengths and areas for improvement) of our own findings.  We can then focus on what we need to do to make improvements.

When we have reviewed the evidence we agree a level against the 6 point scale (if appropriate):

Level 6 excellent outstanding or sector leading
Level 5 very good major strengths
Level 4 good important strengths with areas for improvement
Level 3 satisfactory strengths just outweigh weaknesses
Level 2 weak important weaknesses
Level 1 unsatisfactory major weaknesses