In these times of increased public scrutiny and with ongoing demands for accountability, it is important for the literacy field to become part of the bigger picture. The Employment Ontario network, of which we are an important part, will help us be part of that big picture, and it will provide us with an opportunity to work with many potential partner and/or referral organizations. Literacy agencies need to be organizations that talk the same language as other service providers, and many of our fellow Employment Ontario partners have already implemented some type of performance management system.
As literacy practitioners, we need to be able to demonstrate that literacy agencies provide quality services with consistently measurable results. We want to be able to share successes and show the positive impacts and benefits that our programs provide to the thousands of clients that come through our doors each year. CIPMS can help programs to do that. Implementing CIPMS will enable our literacy agencies to benefit by helping our government counterparts demonstrate that the money invested in adult literacy programs is indeed making a difference.
In a presentation held at the Ontario Association of Adult and Continuing Education School Board Administrators’ (CESBA) pre-conference in December 2006, MTCU described the benefits of a CIPMS as:
Good performance reporting tells how well a program has done and at what cost. Good management requires that a manager know when expectations have been accomplished and be able to demonstrate it. Clear and concrete expectations enable a manager to do this, to know how successful a program has been and where improvements are required. Endnote 5
Once CIPMS is fully implemented, agencies will be able to work more effectively and more efficiently. Knowing that mechanisms are in place to deliver programming that will encourage and allow learners to achieve their goals is the foundation from which this culture of efficiency and effectiveness can start.
The major change that we are likely to notice when implementing CIPMS is that the focus will be on the results that will be achieved, rather than on the processes being used. For example, in recent years, program monitoring has focused on processes as described in the Program Monitoring Report. The emphasis has been on how we do things. This was an important step, because it is essential to have effective and efficient processes in place in order to achieve optimal results. In the future, program monitoring will shift to focusing on the results that we have achieved. The processes are still very important, but agencies have been developing them for quite some time (for example, outcomes-based learning, demonstrations, etc.). Now it is time to put more emphasis on what is being achieved with those processes. It is also time to be more deliberate and focused in the efforts to document the results those processes bring about.