Tools for continuous improvement

There are two tools for continous improvement that can be used by facilities to assess their performance and identify areas for improvement.

Quest

Quest is a tool for continuous improvement, which was developed for the industry aimed primarily at the management of sports facilities. Quest defines industry standards and good practice and encourages their ongoing development and delivery within a customer focused management framework.

There are two models:

• The Facility Management model is aimed at the management of any facility which provides an activity for customers; public, private, trust and voluntary sector.
• The Sports Development model is aimed at the management of any team which provides or facilitates participation in an activity; public, private, trust and voluntary sectors.

Since 1999 Quest has been managed by Sport England on behalf of the other home country sports councils.

National Benchmarking Service

Operating since 2000, the National Benchmarking Service for Sport Centres ( NBS ) provides local authorities with a rigorous, robust and independent assessment on the performance of their sports and leisure centres compared with that of equivalent 'family' facilities elsewhere in the country. It covers the following aspects of service delivery:

• Access - the extent to which facilities are used by disadvantaged groups and new users
• Finance - representing subsidy, cost and income performance
• Utilisation - the scale and nature of usage and non-usage of facilities
• Customer satisfaction - the extent to which users are satisfied with different attributes of the facility and how important these attributes are to them.

It uses three main sources of information:

•  Auser survey
• A financial return
• Catchment area data.

The service options which are available:

1. NBS Standard Report
   This report presents and analyses the performance of the centre with respect to four performance dimensions: access by specific groups of users; utilisation of the centre as a whole; finances of the centre; and customer satisfaction at the centre. It requires the client to organise a survey of their centre’s customers over typically a nine day period of normal use; and supply facility and financial details in a management return to the NBS analysts
2. NBS Efficiency Report
   The efficiency report consists of reporting finance and utilisation performance relative to national benchmarks. This efficiency report only requires centres’ management returns; it does not need the user survey, nor the catchment population map and data
3. NBS Effectiveness Report
   This report reports on customers – ie access to the centre by different customer groups, and customers’ satisfaction and importance scores and comparisons. It requires the client to organise a user survey at their centre and inform the NBS analysts of basic features of the centre – e.g. location, facilities, size, management type – but not financial details.
   

NBS Case Studies

Access and utilisation in Mansfield

Access and utilisation in North Herts

Efficiency gains at Three Rivers

Efficiency at Redcar