Process summary
- Define the scope of your pathway - This can relate to activities or outcomes.
- Choose your approach - Your pathway may be drafted after a workshop with staff and potential external partners or on the basis of existing documentation. The first option is preferable but more resource intensive.
- Identify your activities - What does your work entail? It is best to group activities into areas such as intelligence, analysis, support, education and enforcement.
- Analyse your inputs - What do you need to do your work, in terms of staff, information and resources?
- Identify your partners - This will help you assess who else influences the impacts and outcomes of your activity and could thus be a potential source of data.
- Identify your outputs - These are the products of your activity and are typically tangible and countable. The output indicators in performance management frameworks may point you in the right direction.
- Identify your outcomes and impacts - These are the results of your activity, both intended and unintended. In this context, impacts are considered to be long term, with a wide effect on the community or environment.
- Link the elements - The sequence to follow is inputs, activities, outputs, outcomes and impacts. List your findings in each case and connect them with lines to indicate the main causal chains. (You may need to add intermediate elements.)
- Create a comprehensive list of potential indicators - What measures would assess the key elements in your pathway?
- Map these potential indicators against known indicators - Find out whether the data you would like are already being collected by your service or a third party.
- Prioritise your indicators - Decide which of them are necessary to monitor progress given your pathway. The importance, cost and ease of gathering data are all factors here.
- Choose the indicators you wish to include in your dashboard - There should be 12-20, covering the whole sequence and all the main causal chains.
- Arrange your indicators in a dashboard - The aim is to provide a straightforward summary of the vital contribution your activity makes to your community, using a graphical representation of the feedback from your key indicators over the past three years, on a single page divided into four quadrants: input, output, outcomes and impact.
