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The issue

In 2005, the Monmouthshire County Council Local Strategic Partnership (LSP) was struggling to find a way to fully engage with local people and follow through the implementation of proposals. While the recently published Community Strategy (2004-2008) set out a long-term vision for improving the wellbeing of the county, it did not reflect the aspirations of local people and lacked a clear approach for implementing proposals. A cross partnership conference revealed six barriers that were preventing effective collaboration:

1. Limited community and neighbourhood engagement resulted in the community strategy failing to capture the aspirations of local people.
2. The lack of a clear approach for taking proposals forward led to an implementation gap.
3. A power imbalance existed between community groups and larger organisations in the partnership, and between different partnerships.
4. Complex partnership structures led to confusion about the relationship between the local area partnerships and the strategic partnerships. For example, the 19 partnerships had over 200 inter-connections.
5. Too much focus on structure and process and not enough on implementation.
6. Partnership burn-out before implementation. Partnerships started well but energy levels had dropped before implementation began. Meeting attendance became poor and little progress occurred between meetings.

The LSP concluded that conventional approaches to developing and agreeing one clear purpose did not apply to the complex nature of communities and the many agencies involved. A new way of working was required.

What they didTop of page

A lecture on complexity theory in 2001/02 appeared to the chief executive of Monmouthshire County Council to accurately describe the challenges of a multi-stakeholder environment. Subsequently, through a SOLACE newsletter, he became aware of OpenStrategy®, a facilitated process of communication between many stakeholders within a community, developed in New Zealand.

What is OpenStrategy®?

OpenStrategy® is an approach for structuring information using a common language supported by simple web-based tables accessible from all computers with internet access. The OpenStrategy® approach has two main activities: firstly, agreeing and adopting a simple information structure to get the best quality information; and secondly, mapping actions and their consequences to an evolving strategic plan which is shown graphically. The approach can be customised for each partnership.

The logic behind OpenStrategy® is that a partnership or an agency cannot achieve an outcome directly. The partnership can do something (a project), the consequence of which (a result) is merely an output. It is only when those outside the partnership take ownership of the output and use it (a use) that an outcome (a benefit) is realised.

OpenStrategy® involves a partnership (or partnership of partnerships) developing links between these four different types of items. It is explicit that projects and results should be owned by the partnership, but uses and benefits are owned by the community. Ensuring that this transfer of ownership from partnership to community occurs is a key step in the OpenStrategy® approach.

• Projects describe the action that stakeholders have committed themselves to deliver. They will capture what is to be delivered and who is responsible for that delivery (often known as inputs). Stakeholders enter and own the projects and are responsible for keeping information about that project up-to-date (e.g. description, budget) and accepting or rejecting links from other stakeholders to that project. Partners can express their level of support for the project and add in offers of funding. An example of a project would be the development of a food cooperative in an area that does not have shops selling low-cost fruit and vegetables.
• Results describe what the consequence of the project will be (often referred to as outputs). Stakeholders request links between the projects and a smaller number of results. For example, the food cooperative project would result in the increased supply of fresh fruit and vegetables at affordable prices.
• Uses describe either what citizens and communities want to do (aspirations) or how communities will use the results generated by projects. The critical step is ensuring the transfer of ownership from partnership results to the community uses. For example, this would link an increased supply of affordable fresh fruit and vegetables to more families eating more fresh fruit and vegetables.
• Benefits describe the outcomes that flow from how the communities use the projects. Using our example this would be healthier lives due to a better diet. In Monmouthshire, the expected benefits from the community strategy were added to the OpenStrategy® system first and then the projects, results and uses were added to align with these benefits.

How was OpenStrategy® implemented?

The OpenStrategy® approach was introduced to the Monmouthshire LSP and other partnerships at a conference in November 2005. In one of the conference workshops, the approach quickly produced an extensive range of ideas for dealing with transport problems that were not the usual transport responses; for example, improving access to facilities rather than tackling congestion. Since then, every LSP has been engaged in understanding this different way of working and using the information structure and web space for mapping actions and results.

Initially five volunteer facilitators, most with a community development brief, were trained to input items into the system. Eventually, 50 people across all LSPs were trained. There was no control imposed over content, to show that all contributions were equally valued, but access was limited to the LSP. It was operated as a dispersed system managed by protocols and not dependent on any one individual or organisation. For example, one protocol was that a project can only be added to the system if the LSP has the capacity to deliver it and can at least part resource it.

The costs of implementing OpenStrategy® are equivalent to the annual cost of a project co-ordinator with payback estimated to have been achieved in one year. In terms of capacity, about 120 items have been added to the Monmouthshire system since 2005, though other local authorities have added as many as 900 items to their OpenStrategy® system.

Local Service Board

The Monmouthshire LSP has now evolved into a Local Service Board (LSB) which is made up of the main public sector and community organisations. Its role is to improve the way that public bodies and communities work together by providing collective leadership on the issues of most importance to the citizens of the county. The LSB operates at two levels: a core group that meets monthly and a wider stakeholder group that meets bi-annually. Membership of the core group totals 20 people and includes elected representatives of community, town and unitary councils, Monmouthshire Local Health Board, Monmouthshire County Council, Gwent Healthcare Trust, Gwent Police and the Police Authority, Gwent Association of Voluntary Organisations, a senior civil servant from the Welsh Assembly Government, chairs of the major partnerships in the county and an independent chairman. Membership of the wider group includes up to 200 people at any one time and is made up of county councillors, representatives of community and town councils, representatives of all strategic and locality partnerships and representatives of all public service bodies.

Monmouthshire LSB has produced a draft Community Strategy (2008-2011) which used the OpenStrategy® approach to identify projects and as a means of undertaking monitoring and review. Overall four LSBs in Wales are now using OpenStrategy: Torfaen, Powys, Conwy and Monmouthshire.

The benefitsTop of page

A range of benefits have resulted from the use of the OpenStrategy approach in Monmouthshire:

• Each voice is now heard with the same intensity, so reducing the power imbalance and shifting power to the partnerships. Everybody has an equal right and power to contribute so communities are more able to shape their own local services. 
• Strategic gaps are now identified and assumptions challenged. Projects that are unlikely to be adopted by the community can be challenged prior to implementation. The mapping approach also allows delivery gaps to be identified and addressed. This avoids expenditure that does not add to community value. For example, a project for rescuing marshlands only delivered outcomes when plans for increasing the number of school visits to the marshlands were added.
• Projects that might otherwise be diffuse and disconnected can be drawn together into sub-strategies. For example, the Old People’s Partnership found that there were as many items entered by other partnerships to do with older people as they had entered themselves.
• By allowing strategies to remain live and develop over time, OpenStrategy® has been a liberating way of thinking for officers. Stakeholders have joined the debate at different stages and organisational knowledge has been captured and shared. Problem solving has improved by drawing in ideas and answers from outside the authority.
• There has been a clearer commitment to actions, even if an organisation only has some of the resources for implementation. There is a focus on a few key projects that can be delivered and a move away from vague and unspecific strategies. For example, the Environmental Partnership has used OpenStrategy® to prioritise their projects and activities. As a result the local community and partners are now seeing more projects being implemented.
• There has been a reduction in the time spent in partnership meetings which helps the efficiency agenda. For example, the community safety partnership used to meet monthly but now meets quarterly.
• Councillors have liked the simplicity, the focus on delivery and the jargon-free information that OpenStrategy® has provided. As a result they have a greater clarity about what partnerships are doing and achieving, but do not currently have direct access to the system.
• It has allowed a move away from a hierarchy of partnerships to a network of partnerships recognising that local and community partnerships are equally vital. As a result links between county-wide strategic partnerships and locality partnerships have improved.
• Monmouthshire County Council won an Excellence Wales award for their partnership working using OpenStrategy®.

OpenStrategy® is a very useful tool. It has helped to improve the engagement between projects and beneficiaries which is often a missing link. For example, a new cycleway needs to be both built and advertised in local schools to ensure usage. You can see the benefits of the approach clearly when links are being made between projects that otherwise wouldn’t occur. It is also very difficult to keep up-to-date with what is going on in your own sector let alone other areas and OpenStrategy® helps to give this broader view of activity across the partnership. While I am an advocate and we are using OpenStrategy to review the priorities of the Environmental Partnership, I think there are more benefits to come from OpenStrategy® in the future when it has universal and consistent use across all partnerships and there is increased monitoring of the quality of items and content added.

Sue Mabberley, Countryside Council for Wales, Chair of Environmental Partnership

LessonsTop of page

By pioneering the OpenStrategy® approach, Monmouthshire learnt a number of lessons. The main ones are as follows:

• About six months is required to start using the information structure effectively.
• If they repeated the exercise they would do more experimentation with the approach. They would secure more support for the system and they would increase resourcing, especially to ensure continuity and capacity among the facilitators.
• That there is a need for chief executive leadership and time to embed the approach (about six months spent promoting OpenStrategy® to partnerships).
• The need to implement the approach in a way that is genuinely independent from dominant partnerships and organisations.
• While there were benefits from having an un-policed system, in the longer term there is a need to manage the quality of information added and this has been requested by the partnerships involved. The system is only as good as the information that is added so it needs to be actively maintained and clear guidance provided for new users.
• The information structure is powerful so a partnership can start with the (free) paper processes and get immediate benefits. Monmouthshire did not use the software for the first six months.
• The approach works best and delivers the greatest returns if it is used for complex projects. It is not well suited to very small, simple projects.
• Facilitation capacity can be developed by changing the roles of the partnership coordinators and training users from each of the partnerships to enter information about their projects.
• The software could be more intuitive and this affects how, for example, sub-strategies should be extracted and shared with other officers and councillors.
• Not all stakeholder groups will add items to the system. One third of partnerships in Monmouthshire have yet to add items to the system. The move to a more centralised management and support of the system aims to achieve more universal usage.
• Compliance with external guidance on strategy development can run against the philosophy of OpenStrategy®. As a result Monmouthshire have raised the awareness of the OpenStrategy approach with the Welsh Assembly Government through learning exchanges.

Use of OpenStrategy is an ongoing journey and in the future Monmouthshire is planning to:

• review the OpenStrategy® approach as part of the process for developing the new Community Strategy (2008-2011)
• improve quality control through a single editor or moderator to check and add information to the system
• set up a second site covering the four statutory plans that have resulted from plan rationalisation (Community, Health, Young People and Local Development Plan)
• give the public access to OpenStrategy® to increase transparency
• reduce the number of key words that can be used for projects to improve classification
• use OpenStrategy® as the method to monitor and review the implementation of the 2008-2011 Community Strategy.

Further InformationTop of page

Colin Berg, CEO, Monmouthshire County Council

telephone 01633 644041

Email colinberg@monmouthshire.gov.uk

Details of LSB

Details of OpenStrategy