East Renfrewshire Council develops in house project management qualification to support change

East Renfrewshire Council has developed an in-house SQA-approved qualification in project management as part of a programme of change across the local authority.

It developed the professional development award (PDA) in project management in conjunction with the Scottish Qualifications Authority and Chartered Management Institute.

This is the first time a council has developed its own HND course, which gives project managers the opportunity to develop their capabilities in managing service change in their area of experience.

More than 20 staff have already been through the HND-level course.

Employees are supported by the council’s internal programme management team and organisational development team who mentor, coach and assess candidates. Each candidate must have a real project that they can put into practise.

The council’s culture and sport officer, John West, was a successful SQA candidate who relaunched Giffnock Library into a community hub.

He said: “The PDA award was a wonderful opportunity for me. The entire project management team were inspirational and the project management award was the single most practical and valuable professional development experience I have had in 25 years of working in local government.”

The project management qualification is part of a wider programme of change at East Renfrewshire Council, which has delivered around 70 projects so far, resulting in £4.9m savings, with this figure set to increase by another £1m for 2015/16.

Some of the key changes over the last year have been 550 staff across the council now working agile, a redesigned council website with 524,000 unique users a year, wifi being rolled out to schools and public buildings and the introduction of live chat on the website.

The council has also seen a large increase in the use of digital services, with annual online payments up by 21.4 per cent, a 90 per cent uptake in cashless catering in schools – which East Renfrewshire was the first local authority to offer – and a 40-50 per cent uptake in online planning applications.

It now has 1,000 care finance agreements stored live in an online system for the health and social care partnership and 200 home support workers are agile working.

A new digital portal for home care service users and their families is expected to go live in 2017.

East Renfrewshire Council chief executive Lorraine McMillan said: “We have an impressive range of plans and projects well underway to help us improve the services we offer and realise efficiencies wherever possible.

“The scale and pace of this programme of modernisation reaches every corner of our council and are the key drivers in achieving our vision to be modern, digitally enabled organisation.

“We recognised early on that the best people to drive these improvements are the staff who know their services the best. 

“We therefore set out to match our ambitions to modernise and improve with an investment in the creation of the in-house capacity and skills to empower staff to manage and lead this change.

“The result is that we are now building skills across our organisation whilst at the same time enabling change projects which are making real improvements to the lives of our residents and releasing efficiencies at the same time.”