Prioritising Outcomes

Making decisions about priorities is a key aspect of effective leadership and governance. In the current economic climate, prioritisation is becoming of increasing importance within the public sector. In essence, prioritisation is about making choices. What should we really focus our resources on? What should we do less of? Or even what should we stop doing altogether? 

If you are looking to prioritise outcomes the following questions may be useful for you to consider.

• How can you use help leadership structures to recognise that there are benefits to be gained from prioritisation?
• How can you use available evidence to better understand what the partnership can influence and inform decisions about what is considered to be important?
• How can you agree a clear process for decision-making, based upon appropriate governance arrangements?
• How are you going to engage the views of a wide range of stakeholders on what is important to them?
• How can you increase mutual understanding of individual partners’ priorities, flexibilities and restrictions?
• How are you going to agree criteria and weighting to assist in ranking priorities? (This might include factors such as benefits to communities, do they support early intervention / prevention, cost, performance, impact on particular client groups, political priorities, etc.)
• What process will you use to then appraise the potential options against the criteria to agree a small number of key outcomes?
• How are you going to communicate not only your new key priorities but also explain what is no longer considered to be a priority and why?

• How will you agree clear targets and milestones for acheiving your new key priority outcomes?

On this page you can also view a document on prioritising outcomes and presentations from a workshop on the same topic delivered by the Improvement Service.