Publication

Effective portfolio management

Local delivery, national visibility

Field forces are a popular method of co-ordinating decentralised government programmes that aim to deliver services to local communities. At present, however, field forces work in a wide variety of ways, making it difficult to compare progress, reallocate resources and disseminate best practice across programmes. As a result, it is hard for central government to be confident that their programmes will deliver the required services in the agreed timescale.

The key to retaining control of decentralised programmes, and also to making them as effective as possible, is portfolio management, enabled by a standardised (and strongly service-oriented) approach to managing individual programmes. This approach makes it easy to compare the various field forces and obtain accurate value for money estimates across the programmes.

In addition, a standardised approach makes life easier for local authorities because all field forces would collect the same type of data in the same way. Local authorities will also know what type of help they are entitled to from the field force. Best practice can be shared not only between local projects on one programme but across all programmes.