Join a growing community of smaller housing associations using performance comparison and sharing good practice to drive improvement and report to their stakeholders.
- Compare and learn from similar organisations
- National comparisons with HouseMark
- Simple and easy to use
- Affordable both financially and in terms of time
- Reporting for boards, residents and other stakeholders
SPBM Benchmarking – how it works
Benchmarking gets small groups of CEOs working together, sharing and learning from each other
SPBM is a partnership between Skills & Projects and HouseMark.
Members use the SPBM web-application to record details of their own performance and produce comparative reports. The web-application has a library of performance indicators, standards and clear definitions. Subscribers choose performance indicators that are appropriate for them.
Skills & Projects develop and support benchmarking clubs where members discuss performance and share good practice.
Subscribers have access to the HouseMark website which contains a wealth of searchable information and good practice that can save time and money for smaller providers.
Online forums put members in touch with a national network of peers facing similar challenges.
Our members clearly value the service and find it useful in running their businesses. We have had excellent feedback from individual organisations and existing benchmarking clubs that have benefited from using SPBM.
Reports
Skills & Projects provide quarterly and annual performance reports from the comparative data. Reports show how an individual housing association compares against a selected group of similar peers, against smaller HAs nationally, and against the rest of the sector.
Members create reports to compare their performance against small housing associations nationally or any subset they choose, based on size, region and a range of other profile data.
Members also use SPBM to produce reports for their boards, residents and other stakeholders.
Meetings
Benchmarking club meetings offer the opportunity to meet with colleagues from similar organisations facing similar challenges, to network, share ideas and to learn from each other. Typically members meet quarterly.
Comparative reports provided by Skills & Projects underpin benchmarking meetings, providing the focus and basis for many of the discussions. Each meeting tends to concentrate on one or two issues, with members taking responsibility for preparing and leading a discussion where they have particular knowledge and experience, or perhaps where their performance appears to be much better than others.
Performance improvement and good practice go hand-in-hand. Our role as facilitators of club meetings means that we can share good practice between clubs.
You may not have a group of similar organisations nearby with whom to meet on a regular basis. Skills & Projects will do whatever we can to create peer groups for you.
Performance Indicators
We work with small housing associations nationally to maintain our library of performance indicators, standards and definitions. Members are able to select which of these are most useful and relevant to them.
We liaise regularly with HouseMark to ensure that our PIs are in sync with theirs, and performance data from SPBM is copied into the HouseMark PI Tracking database, providing our customers (and theirs) with a broader comparative dataset.
SPBM has clear definitions and worked examples, which makes it easy to understand and calculate indicators. PI data is also checked by Skills & Projects when we produce your reports.
Further information
For more information please look at www.SPBM.co.uk, which includes a list of current subscribers.
Cost
The annual subscription fee for the service is £500 (plus VAT). Our members, who manage between 80 and 800 properties, tell us that this is excellent value for money.
If you would like to find out more, please contact us. We would be happy to put you in touch with one of our existing members if you would like to discuss how the system works for them.
