Worksheet3 Analysing the results
Analysing the results | 3.3
The surveys will produce a lot of information that should help the next Core Group meeting to identify a short list of issues for more intensive investigation. It will also help the process of discussion if someone has already done some work on boiling the results down and identifying possibly significant themes.
We would suggest that, at the first Core Group meeting, three members should take on responsibility for analysing the results and leading the discussion for one of each of the key areas highlighted below.
about your organisation
Although the principal purpose of the About Your Organisation Excel and Word documents is to speed up the process of cluster members getting to know each other’s organisations, they can also produce information that can help take the work of the cluster forward:
- pulling together information on the collective impact of the organisations (“Together we provide services to X people in need, employ Y staff/volunteers, have a turnover of £Z millions . . . .”) can help to set the context for the cluster’s work and provide useful data to raise its profile with external stakeholders and to back up bids for help and resources further down the line;
- it can also help to identify areas where all or most of the members have gaps in key infrastructure functions (HR, ICT support etc) and spark discussions on how they fill these, or highlight areas where some members have in-house expertise which it might be possible for others to tap into.
The Purchasing Survey
Areas to look out for here are:
- items where one or more organisations have costs that are much lower or satisfaction levels that are much higher than some of the others. This can help to identify areas where a supplier is providing particularly good value, and other members could save money by moving their business;
- areas where several members are using the same supplier – this might open opportunities for collective negotiation, for example, in asking auditors and solicitors what added value they might be able to offer if all of the cluster were to sign up with them for a given period;
- areas where the members of the cluster are spending a large amount of money and levels of satisfaction with the service are not high. Common areas might include telephony and utilities supplies. In these cases it might be worth spending some of the cluster’s time in pooling the effort of looking around for better deals.
The survey data can also help to highlight which areas not to spend time on – if each of the members is spending less than £1,000 on a particular area, it is unlikely that it will repay the investment of much of the cluster’s time even if big percentage savings can be made.
The Infrastructure Strengths & Weaknesses survey
This survey is likely to provide the main focus for the next Core Group meeting, and its data can also be the most difficult to make sense of. There are four outputs in the summary reports:
- a summary of each organisation’s assessment of their strengths and weaknesses in each of the key areas;
- a similar grid showing the priority allocated to each;
- a third grid which shows the overall weighting for each area – produced by multiplying the scores from the two previous grids – for each organisation;
- a separate summary sheet which pulls together all the comments which members have made on each area.
A good starting point is to look at the last two columns of the “overall weighting” grid. These provide the average score for each area, and the number of cluster members who have given the area a high priority weighting. The latter is probably the more significant indicator – remember that you are looking for areas of relatively high importance to all of the cluster’s members. It should be simple to produce two tables which rank them from highest to lowest scoring on each of these indicators.
It is then often useful to produce a table which identifies the top three items for each member. Then you will be able to see whether there are any common themes.
Here are some examples of grids:
Producing a short paper with the information presented in this way and a brief commentary can help to provide a starting point for discussions at the next Core Group meeting.
Having done this, it is worth going back to the first grid, showing the priority each organisation has awarded each area. See if there are any discrepancies between the highest priority scores here and the picture that has emerged from the initial analysis. If so, include a brief note in the report. Similarly, include any entries in the summary of comments that either throw light on the picture which may be emerging, or challenge the picture.
Don’t be dispirited if your analysis doesn’t produce a clear picture; it is often not clear at the outset what will be the most productive areas for the cluster to concentrate on. The purpose of analysing the data is to stimulate discussion, not to predetermine its outcome.