Planning and performance monitoring for a public scrutiny body

Planning and delivery in a demanding public environment

The Independent Commission for Aid Impact (ICAI) reviews how the UK spends its aid money and reports what it finds to Parliament. Its findings help shape decisions about where that money goes next.

It does this in a demanding environment. Reviews are long pieces of work, often involving fieldwork in countries where conditions can change quickly. Political events can move a review's timeline at short notice. ICAI answers to its own Board of part-time commissioners, to its sponsoring department, the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO), and to Parliament - and each comes with its own reporting rhythm.

Inside, a secretariat of three teams - reviews, delivery and engagement - each planned in its own way. When a review date moved, the teams who depended on it often heard informally, and Board reports were put together by hand every time.

When this work began, much around ICAI was also shifting. The budget was not yet confirmed, the strategy was in draft with its performance measures still to be agreed, and staff in the review team were moving on. Any planning system built then would have to cope with not knowing what came next.

A scrutiny body looking at its own ways of working

ICAI's Board had already been strengthening how the organisation was governed. The next step it asked for was a more structured way to plan its work and track its performance, in a way that fitted the organisation's size and work.

ICAI's purpose is to look closely at how others deliver. Here it chose to look at itself in the same way: how its plans connected, how its performance was tracked, and what its leaders could see.

What the Board described was a golden thread. A clear line from the organisation's strategic objectives, through the milestones it commits to and the projects that develop it, down to what each team does day to day - and back up again, so leaders could see how everyday delivery was adding up to what ICAI set out to achieve.

It had to work on the software FCDO provides, and the secretariat had to be able to keep it up themselves.

Recommendations on organisational design or structure were out of scope, and so was the content of the strategy itself. The job was to build the system that would carry the strategy and connect delivery to it.

A planning and performance system built around how the work really happens

We worked with the secretariat and commissioners from discovery through to embedding. Four ideas shaped what we built. Each one applies well beyond ICAI, to any organisation trying to plan and track its performance under pressure.

Seeing how the work flows before planning it

Most organisations have two versions of their process: the one that is written down and the one people follow. Over time, the two drift apart. A planning system built on the written version ends up tracking a process nobody is running.

At ICAI, we mapped the full lifecycle of a review - every stage, who is involved, where decisions are made, and where the supplier and commissioners come in - and shared it unfinished, for the team to correct. People correct a draft far faster than they describe a process from a blank page. Most of the map was confirmed. The few corrections were the useful part. They showed where the documented process and the lived one had drifted, including a responsibility that had moved from the supplier to ICAI without the paperwork catching up.

A map like this gives an organisation a shared starting point. Teams can agree what counts as a milestone, what triggers a change in status, and who does what, before any of it is tracked. As the Head of Reviews put it: "You can have a bespoke approach, but you still have a process."

Putting decisions in front of the right people

The same information means different things at different levels. A board needs to know whether the organisation is delivering what it promised, and what needs its decision. A management team needs a working view of who is doing what. Individual leaders need to check on their own work when it suits them. When everyone receives the same report, a board can spend its time on detail and miss the one item that needs it.

ICAI's Chief Commissioner described three levels of use, and the system serves each one. The Board view separates items for assurance from items needing a decision, and it is drawn straight from the data the teams already keep, so nobody writes it from scratch. Board decisions are tracked through to completion, a gap the Chief Commissioner and Head of Secretariat spotted at design review. Commissioners can check on the reviews they lead without asking anyone. Dates that constrain everyone, like parliamentary recess, are visible to all.

The result is a board that spends its time where it counts, and teams that spend less of theirs writing reports.

Keeping the thread from strategy to delivery

Strategies are often written in one place and delivery planned in another. The link between them gets made by hand, at reporting time, by someone working backwards. A golden thread works when every piece of work connects to an objective from the start, and when it runs both ways: the strategy says what to track, and the tracking shows what the strategy needs to say.

At ICAI, the strategy was still in draft and its performance measures were not yet agreed. Waiting for them would have meant waiting too long. So the thread was built first. Every project links to the organisation's strategic themes, so delivery can be seen against intent from day one. The outcomes ICAI cares about most - whether government responds to a review, how many recommendations it accepts, whether findings are taken up in Parliament - have their own place in each project's record, ready to fill as the measures take shape. Judging whether those outcomes count as success stays with the commissioners.

The Chief Commissioner described the two-way flow between strategic intent and day-to-day delivery as "spot on", and saw a wider shift in it: "we are aiming at a bigger culture shift to harness all our functions behind strategy delivery."

An organisation does not need a finished strategy to start connecting its work to one. It needs a thread strong enough to carry the strategy as it develops.

Making the system part of how people work

Planning systems rarely fail loudly. People drift back to their own spreadsheets, the shared version goes stale, and before long nobody trusts it. What keeps a system alive is less about the software and more about the habits around it, and whether people feel able to be honest in it.

ICAI had tried a single planning tool before and set it aside as too complex. So the aim was something lighter to use than the documents it replaced, built on tools the team already had. Each team keeps its own detailed working documents. The shared system carries what other teams need to see.

Two smaller choices did a lot of work. When a timeline changes, the system asks why, in a Learning Log - named that way, and not a change log, because asking what could be improved makes honest entries easier than recording what went wrong. And a short set of working agreements, made with the management team, names the risk to watch for and the sign of success: the first regular meeting where the system, not a verbal update, is what everyone refers to.

A system in daily use, tested under pressure

After handover came a soft launch, as teams entered their real work and got familiar with it. Soon afterwards, the Chief Commissioner moved to a full launch: from then on, this was the way ICAI planned and tracked its work.

Then came the test nobody would have chosen. A reduced budget settlement led to significant cuts to ICAI's work programme and its staff. Reworking a programme in those conditions means seeing, quickly and clearly, what each choice will touch - which reviews, which milestones, which commitments to Parliament and the sponsoring department.

Because every piece of work was already connected to what ICAI was trying to achieve, its leaders could see those links while they made their choices. The Head of Secretariat described the system as "integral to this process." The Chief Commissioner called it "excellent for its intended purpose", and said that through a major restructure and change to the business model, the overview it provides had been "crucial."

The decisions about the restructure were ICAI's own. What the system gave its leaders was a clear view of the consequences.

Planning and performance monitoring for organisations on moving ground

For organisations like ICAI, steady conditions rarely last. Timelines move with political events. Budgets are confirmed late. Fieldwork depends on access that can disappear overnight. Oversight comes from several directions at once.

On moving ground, planning and performance monitoring earn their place in three ways.

They keep the thread from strategy to delivery intact while both are changing. When the strategy is still being written and the budget is still being set, the temptation is to wait. A system built to carry the strategy as it develops lets strategy and delivery shape each other from the start, and shows leaders what is at stake when something has to give.

They make knock-on effects visible early. The Chief Commissioner named the risk precisely: "successive micro-delays that lead to bigger delays." Each small slip is reasonable on its own. A system that records why things move, and shows who else is affected, lets an organisation see the pattern while there is still time to act.

They put each decision in front of the right people. When the system separates assurance from decisions, leaders spend their limited time where it counts.

What it takes is a structure that matches how the work happens, views that match what each person needs to see, and agreements that make keeping it up part of the working week. Built that way, a planning and performance system becomes most useful in the moments when the plan has to change.

About this work

James Freeman-Gray led this work for Mutomorro, from discovery through design, build and embedding, working with ICAI's secretariat and commissioners.

See more of our work in strategic alignment.