Affinity Water (AfW) identified the need to change how they monitored and measured performance against their regulatory Performance Commitments as a result of not meeting targeted performance across almost all Performance Commitments. With ownership and accountability for AfW’s performance against key metrics split across numerous directorates, there was no way to correlate the impact of capital investments, operational improvement initiatives and targeted customer experience improvements to the outcomes and therefore the inability to proactively prioritise and target specific improvement against individual metrics.
We identified the need to centralise, join-up and align a number of fragmented approaches to managing their regulated performance metrics.
Working across directorates and with all functions, we identified and produced a set of performance improvement plans targeting the top eight PR19 Performance Commitments, capturing the estimated incremental benefit of each improvement initiative against each of the key metrics. In order to monitor progress against plans, we identified and established a range of new leading KPIs and carried out a comprehensive gap analysis across all existing data collection and reporting processes.
In addition, we carried out a review of existing performance governance arrangements including meeting and organisational structure, performance measure owners and key stakeholders to identify key challenges and opportunities for improving performance management.
We developed AfW’s first Performance Management Strategy along with a set of new performance reporting dashboards, consistent across all metrics, providing the ability to see trends not only for individual metrics but the relationship between metrics.
AfW’s improved performance management capability and ability to proactively monitor performance risk has led to more targeted improvement plans with engagement and buy-in from the senior leadership team. With better visibility and transparency of current performance and risks to performance, the SLT have the ability to influence the outcomes more readily.
With a new performance management governance structure and the ability to look at performance across the organisation consistently, the SLT have been able to prioritise investment and resources towards improvement initiatives which have the biggest gain or financial impact if targeted outcomes are not achieved.
Data gaps being addressed and more automated data capture has improved data-led decision making at all levels of the organisation, enabling more targeted improvement plans and reporting consistency and automation of dashboard production has significantly reduced the amount of time spent collating data enabling an enhanced focus on performance improvement analysis and intelligence.
