• Designed for small housing associations
• Compare and learn from similar organisations
• Simple and easy to use
• Affordable both financially and in terms of time
• Reporting for boards, residents and other stakeholders
• 55 members

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 definitions.

Skills & Projects develop and support benchmarking clubs where members discuss performance and share good practice.

Skills & Projects provide quarterly and annual performance reports from the comparative data.

Members can also 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.

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.

We are currently looking at how we can work with HouseMark to produce more Good Practice materials and reports for the small HA sector.

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 we hope that by the end of 2010 we will be able to exchange performance data with HouseMark, providing our customers (and theirs) with a broader comparative dataset.

The on-line help has clear definitions and worked examples which makes it easy to understand and calculate indicators.