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ioning guidance workshop

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Good Practice in Regeneration

On 4th June the “Guidance on how to develop and implement a commissioning process” was launched with a workshop facilitated by the Chair of the Birmingham CAN! Partnership Steering Group, Jonathan Driffill and Michael Brown and Rosie Edwards from M.E.L. Regeneration. Participants included officers from other Single Regeneration Budget Programmes(SRB), Birmingham City Council and New Deal for Communities King’s Norton. The Guidance was developed out of an evaluation of Birmingham CAN’s experience of designing and implementing a Commissioning Process to allocate its funding and achieve its strategic objectives. It is a practical tool which can be used by other regeneration programmes wanting to use this approach and outlines:

The discussion centred around how a commissioning process actually works in practice, in particular, how to work with consortiums of organisations. The SRB6 team, who are currently developing a commissioning process with one of Board sub-groups, were able to share their experience of how the guidance could be used in practice. One of the participants expressed the view that the honesty of the commissioning process was refreshing and hoped there would be more opportunities for people to share both good and bad practice.

The development of the Guidance arose out of Birmingham CAN!’s wish to learn from our mistakes and share our good (and bad!) practice with others. Birmingham CAN! has never been afraid to take risks and try out new ways of doing things, however, innovation necessarily involves making mistakes and adjustments. This was particularly true of the Commissioning Process, undertaken by the Programme in 2000, which aimed to commission consortia of identified intermediary organisations to carry out activities defined by the Programme’s Partnership Steering Group in order to meet strategic objectives.

For a copy of the “Guidance on how to develop and implement a commissioning process”, please call 0121 678 8823 or e-mail BirminghamCAN@bvsc.org