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Management Board | Development Committee | Audit Committee | Human Resources Committee

DFID Management Board

Membership | Terms of Reference | Minutes of Meetings

Record of the Management Board meeting 15 December 2003

In working towards the delivery of the Public Service Agreement and Service Delivery Agreement, the Management Board will aim to:

A. communicate the vision, role, direction and priorities of DFID to staff and other stakeholders;

B. ensure DFID's financial resources and staff are allocated and managed effectively;

C. monitor and improve DFID's performance;

D. protect and enhance DFID's reputation as a highly effective international development organisation.

Attendees:

Secretary:Charlie Whetham

Observing: DFID Zambia    

Suma Chakrabarti welcomed the observers.

I Policy Division reorganisation evaluation

(section removed for sensitivity reasons)

II Corporate Performance Management

1. Sue Wardell described how the Quarterly Management Report (QMR) could be further developed so that progress information across all key areas of work in the Department was monitored by focusing on a limited number of key performance indicators which were judged critical to the Department's ability to deliver, and which were underpinned by a clear analysis of linkage between the major themes. Professor Andy Neely, Associate Director of the Advanced Institute for Management and Chairman of the Centre for Business Performance at Cranfield School of Management, delivered a detailed presentation on possible models to achieve this end.

2. Graham Farrant, Chief Executive Officer of Barking and Dagenham Council, which had adopted one of these techniques for corporate performance management, described how the process had prompted the Council's Board to re-evaluate all aspects of their corporate performance management, and to rebalance these.

3. In discussion, the following points were made:

i. it would be particularly useful to identify and develop links between topics, to enable the QMR to be more interrogative and analytic, and thus to enable the Board to anticipate problems better;

ii. the QMR was starting to become more widely known and utilised within DFID. The process of developing key performance indicators would ensure that the QMR contained information which a wide cross-section of the Department thought important for the Board.

4. In conclusion, the Board agreed:

i. that it was very keen on the proposals, and strongly supported the underlying principle that it was important continually to strengthen and evolve corporate performance management systems;

ii. option 2 for taking these proposals forward: PED would work with a smaller group of key staff, including some Board members and Directors, to develop a draft set of indicators;

iii. that the key performance indicators would influence the Board's objectives, Board members' personal objectives, and DFID's Performance Partnership (with the Cabinet Office);

iv. PED should discuss these proposals with Directors and executive members of the Board separately in advance of their awayday in February.

III AOB

1. Bill Griffiths described recent audit-related work which he had been carrying out in his Non-Executive Director role:

i. on 31st October he attended the Conference 'Getting the Best out of your Audit Committee' which launched the useful new Treasury Audit Committee guidelines. Earlier in October, in anticipation of this Conference, a group of Chairs of Audit Committees in Whitehall Departments got together to exchange views - this had turned out to be a very interesting meeting and the group planned to meet regularly in future;

ii. on 10 December Bill spoke at the HMT 'Government Heads of Internal Audit' Annual Conference on the subject of the relationship at DFID between the Audit Committee and Internal/External Audit;

iii. the next FAC meeting on the 19th of December would discuss all of this, and would consider a stocktake of where DFID was in respect of Audit Committee and related governance matters; but also to see how we might get even better and continue to influence across Whitehall.