Client: Bury Council
Date: March 2020 - September 2020
Support offered: We were originally commissioned pre-Covid-19 to support the council to work alongside the Team Bury (which involves a number of organisations from the public, private and voluntary sectors operating across the borough, including among others NHS, housing, education, police and probation agencies) to develop a 10-year strategy for the borough.
The Covid-19 crisis changed our work significantly. Alongside the continued development of the 10-year strategy, we supported the council to plan its recovery from Covid-19. Much progress has been made during the crisis regarding integrated working and community engagement. There was a need to “lock in” these helpful behaviours and create sustainable structures which allow the co-operation to continue in a way everyone can sign up to. A key consideration was to ensure that Covid-19 recovery efforts are driven by a coherent vision for the borough and long-term strategy.
Outcomes achieved: We produced three key deliverables in this project:
The strategy document which presents the overarching vision for the area and outcomes for a set of priority areas (People, Place, Business, Ideas, Infrastructure);
The action plan which sets out the key steps and initiatives that will need to be taken to secure the strategy delivery;
The performance framework of high-level outcome measures for the 2030 themes and priorities, which can be used to track progress from the 2020 baseline.
We have designed a bespoke methodology for developing the Bury 2030 Strategy. The aim of our approach is to produce a final output that draws on best practice nationally but is led and shaped by stakeholders across Team Bury and is right for the Bury context. We built on the significant work already undertaken to develop the strategy for Bury and reviewed all existing documents to understand the unique Bury context in detail. We also brought our learning from elsewhere on the key trends in public service reform, best practice strategies and initiatives to support community engagement.
The Bury 2030 Strategy document was developed via an iterative process using agile sprints. This allowed us to share early drafts with the key stakeholders and incorporate their views and input into a single strategy and roadmap for 2030.
Due to Covid-19 restrictions our work has been entirely remote and conducted using six virtual workshops, over 30 one to one interviews and various interactive tools supported by an increased level of direct communications with key people.
As we were developing place-based strategy and initiatives that cut through traditional organisational silos, we were engaged with a number of key stakeholders across the system (including the borough Gold Command, council executive team, members of the cabinet, CCG, NHS providers, housing association, police, faith, businesses and community leaders).
We worked in close partnership with our client as a joint team. This ensured that knowledge of the processes and methodologies were transferred to the local team who continue the work and mobilise the strategy.