Project Prioritisation
The Towns Fund Delivery Partner is sharing blog posts the week of August 3 – 7 covering lessons learnt from our work with Cohort 1 towns who submitted their Town Investment Plans on 31 July. This post covers some lessons from our work on Project Prioritisation.
Cohort 1 towns put in heroic efforts to submit their Town Investment Plans (TIPs) on time. Being at the start of the process and only having received Towns Fund Delivery Partner support and the templates in the last few weeks before submission, we’ve inevitably noticed some learning points from a project prioritisation perspective that we’re sharing below.
Establish a clear project prioritisation process early on. Most cohort 1 towns had a good set of projects, but it often wasn’t clear how they had compiled this list. This may have been that they had a prioritisation process but hadn’t included it in their draft as they were worried about word count (which is where a judicious use of an annex comes in to play) or they hadn’t followed a clear project prioritisation process in the first place and were going to have to work backwards to establish one. If the latter, this will invariably always be a much more painful way to do it – it’s hard to stress enough how much easier it is to do these things in the right order!
Early on, make sure your projects fit the overarching Towns Fund criteria. It wasn’t always clear with the Cohort 1 towns that they had looked at each project in turn to check that it fit the Towns Fund criteria. We’re proposing towns conduct a two-step sift of projects, and the first sift ‘go-no go’ list can be found in the blog ‘Project Prioritisation 101 – getting started’. This includes making sure that your projects fit the Towns Fund Intervention themes of: Local Transport; Digital Connectivity; Urban regeneration, planning and land use; arts, culture and heritage; skills infrastructure; enterprise infrastructure.
Do your projects support COVID-19 recovery and Clean Growth? Whilst projects don’t on their own necessarily need to address both COVID-19 recovery and Clean Growth, it should be clear how the overarching programme of projects does address these areas. Some Cohort 1 towns had to work backwards with their justifications, which is often harder work than making the case in the first place...
Use your project prioritisation process to help develop your Theory of Change. Some Cohort 1 towns were struggling to produce Theory of Change for their projects, and were having to work backwards (as mentioned earlier, this is always the more painful way round to do it!). The Theory of Change for your project should ‘pop’ out of your project prioritisation process, and it should make clear the link between your evidence, strategy and vision. We’ll be describing how to do this in a blog using a prioritisation tool.
Keep your Theory of Change simple. Some towns over-complicated their Theory of Change models for each project, with too many boxes leading to repetition and making it confusing to read. Consider using the Theory of Change outlined in the Magenta Book on page 25 (and see diagram below) to keep it simple. MHCLG are interested in seeing a clear logic chain between the proposed intervention (the input), what they will actually see in place as a result (the output), and what this will lead to in the medium term (the outcome) and the long term (the impact). Some towns confused outputs and outcomes – an output is quite literally what is being delivered/produced/built (eg a cycle lane, a bridge, a skills centre), and the outcome is what happens as a result of the output (eg more people cycling, more people getting trained).
Consider early on if you want to pursue up to £50m of funding. Some cohort 1 towns wanted to go above £25m but hadn’t developed a clear rationale for extra funding or looked at the regional and national impacts interventions could have. It’s worth considering this early on in the prioritisation process – is there a clear justification that proposed interventions would have regional and national impacts? If not, then pursuing funding over £25m could be hard to justify. Knowing this early on will save a lot of pain later.
Develop clarity on the amount of funding needed early on. Some cohort 1 towns struggled to identify if other funding sources had been explored and some funding requests were not clearly defined (e.g., with big ranges). At other times funding was sought for the development of a project, not the implementation itself. Clarity on all these points early on makes the project prioritisation process much easier. If clarity itself isn’t possible, then at least an understanding that clarity will be needed sooner rather than later to aid decision making.