Evaluating the process
Co-production as a process has its own outcomes so that as well as producing better outcomes and decisions for the project, the participants will also benefit through their involvement.
Each co-production project should have some time inbuilt for reflection and lessons learnt. Any learning should be shared through the internal co-production network.
Many organisations use a co-production audit as an ongoing tool to enable them to assess how established co-production is within their work. This will be further explored locally.
Learning is intended to be an ongoing conversation, involving everyone who has taken part. Shared reflection is valuable in understanding how people have experienced the co-production process and how to make improvements in future activity.
Measuring the impact
There are 2 main reasons for measuring:
- prove: gathering information to demonstrate the value of something to others
- improve: gathering information to learn what is and isn’t working and generate learning to make the work better while we are doing it
We need to make sure we have a mix of measures that help us to prove and improve while we are co-producing.
We need to work with people to measure what matters to them and to measure with people - as much as possible. We should involve people in agreeing what should be measured and how, even if this is different to the usual data we collect.
We must pay attention to the different types of information we will be collecting. Where previously, we may have used something based on a spreadsheet and numbers, it is likely that the information gathered from co-production will be more qualitative. This includes case studies, interviews, diaries, logs and photographs. We know this is also important in generating learning and insight.
We need to make sure the people involved in co-producing the activity are also involved in evaluating and learning from it. We need to make use of the wide range of experiences and insights in order to improve our future work.
We must build learning into all of our work together. When we are getting new work underway, we will agree our shared goals (outcomes) at the beginning and make time to check in on progress each time we meet.
Consider the language you use together, to make sure everyone can contribute. We will use phrases such as ‘what will success look like’ as it’s more accessible than ‘evaluation’. Asking everyone ‘how will we know it’s working’ will enable everyone to identify indicators that matter to them.
We will make time for learning together as a council and sharing our learning (the good, the bad and the ugly) with our colleagues each time we work on co-production.
Delivery on our values
We will be continuing to review our approach to co-production and will update this framework each year as our learning grows. We are committed to reflecting on our co-production activity to understand what has and hasn’t worked. There is high ambition to make the most of co-production and use it across our services, and adapting this framework will help us reach this.