Limits of formalized PM practices

Both organizations struggled to use formalized PM practices to identify and describe several facets of performance. One Project Manager at YF described the limits of formalized commercial measures as such: “All the good stuff is not written down, is not measured. It is the conversations with the young people, the thank-you three years after they move-on, the beliefs, independence and skills stirred in the [young people]. This is not captured; except in a newsletter or report for externals, and the collection of this information is just seen as administration by staff. What staff actually do for a living, the difference they make, is not measured”. Even more worrisome was how deficient formal measurement seemed to be at portraying the actual indicators of success in young people transitioning through services: “We can tick box success, but you can look at their life and go “I don’t think they’re going to do very well”” (Housing Manager1). The Housing Manager is alluding to the final check-list when young people are getting ready for move-on that involves selecting whether or not they have employment and an accommodation to move into. However, these final checks do not confirm an essential component of successful move-ons, i.e., the deeper behavioral patterns related to personal self-efficacy and confidence.

Oddly enough, managers also spoke of PDRs as limiting, as they held back top performers; a Direct Access Project Manager at YF described the process as such: “With the PDRs it’s about the individual’s personal performance. And really, it’s quite hard. If someone is performing quite well and they’re meeting their target, there’s no level to go up to. Do you understand? Yeah. It’s you could say: “you’re doing well, you’re meeting all your targets and it’s quite hard”. You could keep up in a meeting in saying that. It’s easier to work with someone who’s not meeting their targets to try then to bring them up, yeah, than it is someone that’s hit a target. There’s nothing for that person. That can be demotivating sometimes if someone hasn’t got anything else to go up to.”

Throughout observations several stakeholder complaints concerning the limits of formal practices were witnessed. At a Manager’s meeting, the support staff expressed frustration with the target for filling a room vacancy (i.e., four days), as sometimes the reason a room would remain vacant was not explicable purely

through the number. Although the allocation officer was expressing dissatisfaction with several projects, staff tried to explain the vacancies were due to not wanting to put two potentially risky youth side-by-side, or the room being physically located too far away from staff offices for appropriate observation of a presenting young person. The Head of Support summed it up as: “Although there are hard targets that [we] need to meet, quite often the soft indicators have a massive impact on whether [staff can] meet those hard targets”. “Soft indicators” here mean the non-measured actions and decisions which are a part of service delivery (e.g., relationship management, tailored support, etc.). An excerpt of the report being discussed in respect to the vacancy target during this observation is shown in Figure 5.4.

Figure 5.4: Vacancy target report used in Manager’s meeting

At OE, the SMT was struggling to define its environmental welfare measure through formal KPIs: “That is a bit of a wobbly jelly that we can’t quite grab a hold of” (Finance Director). The Head of Programs viewed the problem as such: “At the end of the day we are not here to employ lots of people, or to run a profitable business, are we? We are here to change people – and that is the most difficult to monitor, isn’t it?” The experiential nature of benefiting from organic gardening was

extremely difficult to label as any one measure. As the Head of Income also elaborated, most of OE’s goals were longer term aims that could not be captured in a financial metric: “We are an organization which is very much about our sort of being a long term objective and not a business trying to produce a profit or a dividend for shareholders. That’s not our ultimate objective and people join us, people donate money to us, because we’re a charity with those core longer-term objectives. And it’s quite hard to measure how much of a contribution you're making towards those long term objectives, so there’s a danger you get bound up very much in: right, have we met the objectives for this specific project?”

Even at a project level, the coordinators were resorting to their own personal measurement practices (e.g., face-to-face informal conversations with beneficiaries) in order to fully understand performance: “We have to adhere to all the European guidelines; they fund everything through measures, which all have outputs. So I am constantly measuring against those, and with social projects that is often quite difficult. When DEFRA are looking for numbers in boxes, a lot of the work we do is intangible, it’s not… you know… so it’s quite difficult” (Trailblazer Project Lead). In the end the Trailblazer Project Lead supplanted the numbers with visits to participants: “…we have to collect all the numbers but it would be… I would try and be quite informal: we would do it over a cup of tea, and also talk about all of the other things – the impact and what else has been going on”.

Ultimately, both organizations struggled to apply formalized PM practices that enabled the full expression of change, transformation, and long-term goals inherent to welfare objectives. Yet, if we consider the success of the social value measurement tools used by the employees on the frontlines with the beneficiaries, it would suggest that not all PM is inhibitive to such aims; rather, it is the way in which the practice lends itself to being implemented and used by the individuals interacting with it. The major difference in these practices was whether the properties measured by a given measurement mechanism aligned with what an individual believed to be important concerning the measurand. Social value measurement was a co-creative process that reflected the actions of the employees as they actually created the welfare performance on behalf of the organization (e.g., discussions concerning emotional and physical well-being). Of course, the setting of a KPI related to social welfare or the assessment of employee performance (e.g.,

through PDR targets) rarely involve such rich actions, as the primary aim of these mechanisms is to describe the phenomenon in a simple numerical formula.

These findings demonstrate that the meanings of the actions associated to attributing value to measurands (e.g., recording numbers and tracking statistics, or conversing with beneficiaries to ascertain mental health) are a part of the process not only of understanding performance but also of creating it. Moreover, various practices (e.g., KPIs, the Outcome Star) appeared to be more or less relevant for different aspects of organizational performance (e.g., financial and effectiveness indicators appeared suitable for commercial goals, whereas social value measurement tools were most useful for social welfare goals).