Governance and delivery
Arms-lengthiness
Decide what you need to control, what others should be free to decide, and what happens if delivery fails. Then examine which delivery arrangements could carry those choices.
How far away should delivery sit?
‘In-house or outsourced?’ leaves too much out. You can own a delivery body without directing its daily work. You can contract out the work and remain answerable for the results. Community ownership, competition, the right to intervene, and the ability to bring a service back are different choices.
This tool separates those choices. It compares your intended arrangements with 11 families of delivery model across 21 questions. The result is a shortlist to investigate, with the mismatches exposed. It helps you decide what to examine and what to ask of it.
I use ‘arms-lengthiness’ for the combination of freedoms, retained responsibilities, and relationships involved. Distance from the parent organisation is an inadequate measure on its own.
Start with the purpose of the work. A delivery model is an arrangement for achieving something. If a service contains several purposes, assess the parts separately before deciding whether they belong together.
Use it in a decision
Define the service
State whose purposes it serves, where the work begins and ends, and what must improve. Keep an in-house option as an explicit comparator.
Set the desired arrangements
Answer the 21 questions for the future you need. Write down the reasoning, including disagreements. Low scores aren't automatically safer.
Examine the closest profiles
Read the differences as carefully as the ranking. A strong overall fit can conceal a single condition that makes an option unacceptable.
Test capability and consequences
Check commissioning capability, support functions, the proposed delivery body, and the wider market or community. Test an actual arrangement, including its failure plan.
Make and revisit the decision
Record the choice, rejected options, evidence, and remaining uncertainties. Specify a review point and what would trigger reconsideration.
Who should be involved?
The people who receive the service, those who deliver it, those who commission it, and those who will carry its risks. Score separately first where power differences could suppress disagreement. Compare the reasons before negotiating a shared assessment.
A disagreement about ‘ownership’ may be a disagreement about public legitimacy, asset protection, employment, or who gets blamed. Keep that substance in the room.
What the numbers mean
The percentages show closeness to illustrative model profiles. They aren't success probabilities or independently validated measures of suitability.
All 21 criteria have equal weight in the original calculation. Legal obligations, continuity requirements, and other conditions that cannot be traded away must be tested separately.