UNITE – Amicus ULF National project - Management Information

Background

When the AEEU and MSF unions merged into Amicus their existing Union Learning Fund projects were drawn together to form the first Amicus ULF project beginning in April 2004. This project also incorporated the national ULF projects of both UNFI and GPMU and goes on to March 2010.

A national project of such a large union is very complex organisationally. Including the workings of 2 additional large scale national projects that work across 25 sectors in every region of England has presented many issues.

Key issue – how to gather good information and use it appropriately

The ULF collects management information in many categories from unions at each quarter end. This includes information on:

• Courses that member learners have enrolled for and then gained a qualification in
• Union Learning Representatives trained
• Employers engaged in the learning process and with a learning agreement with Amicus
• Learning centres opened or improved, and
• The number of members that have been engaged in discussions about their learning journey

For Amicus, the task of collecting this information from such a large body of people and in so many sectors became a major issue. For them the issues were:

• How do we get hold of the information?
• Who will provide the information?
• Who in the project will decipher the information?
• How do we know that the information is correct?
• After we give the information to ULF what do we want from it?

Taking a structured approach

Jim Telford, Amicus Project Manager, in discussion with the management team decided that the issue of management information (MI) was so important that they needed to put in place a strategy to cope with this strand of the work. This was achieved by appointing John Stevenson, a Learning Development Coordinator within the Lifelong Learning team as the MI specialist responsible for the monitoring and evaluation of the ULF project. John then set about the task by working with the project’s management team and all of the regional Learning Organisers to create a system of data collection. John said,

“Data comes from many people and many organisations and this needs to be regulated so that we can first of all meet ULF deadlines and then use the information to support the project’s workers in their regions and sections.”

Creating an orderly flow of information

The structure chosen includes the gathering of monthly information from each of the 1200 ULRs throughout the country, who report in either paper or electronic form to their Regional Learning Organisers. The LOs also collect information from the learning providers that they use. The LOs then collate and report the information to John who will then add this information to that collected from the Amicus learning centres to produce the quarterly information for the ULF.

“This is as straightforward as we could make the system for our ULRs but for management we needed to support the regions with other initiatives”, said John.

Using information as a tool for the management team

Within the ULF contract, agreed targets were laid out for all of the items of MI to be collected. The management team then agreed a breakdown of targets for each of the regions taking account of membership, workplaces and the number of Learning Organisers in the region. The structure within the project allows for team meetings to be held in each region every 4/6 weeks where the MI will be discussed and addressed by the team. The total and regional information is reported to the management team each quarter together with reports from the regional meetings of their assessment of the MI results. The national Steering Group meets three times per year to receive a full national MI picture, presented by John, where management can be questioned and where action can be taken if necessary.

Gaining benefit from well structured information

By having an MI specialist Amicus have the added bonus that they have access to additional information that can be produced from base ULF data. For example, the MI specialist produced a breakdown of Amicus ULRs by region and sector of employment. When added to the list of employers this then gave each LO a target list of employers for the next period.

John also pointed out that currently the collection of data about learning agreements is very important.

“We have put in place a system which takes the base data and incorporates a very comprehensive list of information about each learning agreement that has been signed. This list is constantly being interpreted for information which will allow negotiators to make improvements, for instance the inclusion of the Skills Pledge.”

MI systems are notoriously difficult to maintain because of all of the changing circumstances that occur and John is the first to admit that difficulties exist in the Amicus system, but it is clear that they now have a structure for the collection of information and its dissemination within and outside of the union.