Benchmarking

The approach Tribal employed was efficient and effective with them doing a lot of the heavy lifting, which helped our internal teams to accommodate the process. Tribal was able to provide comparisons that were particularly useful in understanding our results. Along with some new messages brought to light, the process confirmed many of our expectations and the executive team appreciated the objectivity of Tribal’s voice - the presentation delivered by Tribal was focused and engaging. All in all, it was a worthwhile process which we agreed offered excellent value for money. We look forward to our next project.

We turned to Tribal to help us improve our cost base, following continued cuts in our adult skills grants. Tribal responded extremely quickly; as a result, we were able to remove £14m of pay and non-pay costs immediately with a view to further reductions over time. This has helped significantly improve our financial position.

I found that the process and methodology adopted was very robust and the findings clearly communicated at both summary and detailed level. The team were very professional and provided clear and concise insight into the results and the key challenges that were needed to be addressed.

The messages presented by Tribal have increased a collective appreciation of the Group’s position. Having these delivered via an independent and objective voice has helped focus minds on the importance of the information and how this can help shape how we address the significant challenges we are facing. A very distinctive advantage was the how quickly Tribal was able to provide outputs particularly as we had entered into our strategic planning process for 2018-19. Benchmarking is now embedded as part of the College’s ongoing continuous improvement journey and we are hopeful, with Tribal’s help, the next exercise may provide an opportunity for a more collaborative approach within the region to self-evaluation.