The New Improvement Offer

Services are striving to continually improve as well as delivering a core service of response, prevention and protection to the communities we serve.  Improvement is linked in part to HMICFRS FRS reports, Spotlight Review, State of Fire and our own vision, Fit for the Future.  Government also provides scrutiny to ensure we are meeting our statutory responsibilities while providing value for money to the public purse.

We are responding to these with an enhanced Improvement Offer, which combines the work we are already delivering to services with greater engagement from experienced CFOs and senior leaders who provide peer support to any service that requests additional engagement, be that following an HMICFRS intervention, local event or simply mentoring support for a new leader in post.

In partnership with the support of the Implementation Liaison Managers, the NFCC Chair and Vice Chairs have been exploring ways to establish a much stronger, and documented, foundation to build on the informal and existing support to colleagues CFOs and senior leaders. This has been through cooperation, guidance and mentoring where an FRS may be experiencing operational or administrative challenges including areas for improvement in an inspection, identified gaps in leadership or strategic direction, financial challenges, significant changes to community risk profiles or the need for external expertise in another specific area.

These engagement activities may include:

• Product gap analysis against FRS need
• Service improvement diagnostics
• Benchmarking and evaluation
• Organisational self-assurance methodologies
• Thematic workshops
• Scheduled product / function specific workshops
• Change management methodologies
• Internal governance methodologies
• Benefits management support and engagement

When developing tailored support, we can work with your senior leadership teams and business development leads to outline your service needs and where the peer support of a Chief Fire Officer or senior leader from another service may add value in a peer review capacity.

This approach may include the following steps:

• Step 1: Initial Contact and Discussion
• Step 2: Comprehensive Analysis
• Step 3: Tool and Resource Identification
• Step 4: Monitoring and Reflection
• Step 5: Checkpoint Review
• Step 6: Transition into New Phase

We have mapped existing levels of engagement, in the following table which indicate how we could work together to provide support.

 

High performing	Generally positive	Areas of concern	Serious challenges
Evidenced through inspection / scrutiny and more widely (recruitment, media, community survey, engagement etc) Engagement with Leadership Framework Evidenced embedding of Fire Standards	May be some areas for development or improvement Engagement with Leadership Framework Progress with embedding Fire Standards	Areas of concern identified through scrutiny / event (s) Difficult outcome from external intervention or incident Recent staff challenge at a senior level Significant change to community risk profile	Inadequate inspections / scrutiny judgements Serious performance concerns Poor outcomes from serious incidents or interventions Serious financial challenge Crisis management challenge Serious future challenge
NFCC Improvement	NFCC Improvement	NFCC Improvement	NFCC Improvement
Capture, promote and share Positive Practice Portal / Org Learning Networking Case studies Workshops	Share good practices Support product implementation Regional networking Gap analysis	Targeted support from team and high performing service CFOs/POs Product specific workshops Gap analysis	Targeted support from team and high performing service CFOs/POs Full engagement with senior leaders and business development teams Multiple interventions Gap analysis workshops Peer reviews