Case Study

The Challenge

Barnsley Metropolitan Borough Council faced significant operational challenges following the implementation of the Mosaic social care case management system. Social workers in Children’s Services encountered persistent data quality issues, usability frustrations, and inefficiencies, making daily tasks more difficult.

The process for requesting and implementing system changes was lengthy and resource-intensive, placing a heavy burden on both Children’s Services and IT teams. The original implementation also failed to fully consider data and reporting needs, leading to poor visibility of key insights and a backlog of 60+ unresolved reporting requests in the Business Intelligence (BI) team.

Additionally, senior leadership was spending significant time and effort on problem management, diverting focus from strategic priorities. Recognising the need for a more structured and effective approach, the Council engaged Perform Partners to provide expert Business Analysis support.

Our Approach

Our Change Squads were engaged to assess whether the Mosaic system met user requirements, to support the in-house Business Intelligence (BI) function, and to provide structure and clarity to the change management process. Our approach focused on four key areas:

• Gap Analysis: Conducted a comprehensive gap analysis to clearly articulate the challenges across services and systems. By consolidating insights from stakeholders, existing documentation, and system performance data, we were able to surface pain points and translate them into targeted improvement actions. This work laid the foundation for the overall change effort, aligning all subsequent recommendations under a unified understanding of what needed to change and why.
• System Functionality & Compliance: Critically assessed Mosaic’s suitability and compliance to regulatory and operational needs by evaluating internal commentary, reviewing prior analyses, and bringing clarity to the existing backlog of improvement opportunities.
• Change Management & Process Improvement: Engaged around 25 key stakeholders across Children’s Services, IT, and Adult Social Care to assess and refine change workflows, introduced structured requirements gathering and best practices in change management to create a more controlled and effective system change process. As part of this, we developed a RACI model to clarify roles and responsibilities, improve communication, and strengthen decision-making within the change management process.
• Business Intelligence & Data Management: Worked with the BI team to refine reporting requirements, addressing ambiguity and ensuring clearer, more actionable definitions. Supported a shift towards simplifying outputs to accelerate the delivery of key data into operations.
• Strengthening Business Analysis Practices: Provided recommendations for enhancing Business Analysis (BA) capabilities, enhance governance, and align system changes with strategic objectives. This included targeted process analysis to identify and reduce waste and rework, enabling delivery teams to focus on high-value activities and ensure the right people were engaged at the right time.

“In our work with Perform Partners we experienced outstanding support and expertise at every stage. From the outset they helped us gain a clear and shared understanding of the operational challenges within our social-care environment and structured a compelling approach to tackling them.

By establishing disciplined backlog management, defining requirements with precision and embedding robust change-process frameworks, they enabled our IT and service teams to work far more effectively.

The clarity they brought to our data-dashboard requirements, the documentation of a data dictionary and prioritised roadmap for short, medium and long-term improvements provides us with lasting capability, not just a quick fix.

Thanks to Perform Partners we now operate with greater clarity, stronger governance, better data insight and a sustainable foundation for future improvements. We are delighted with the outcome.”

Wendy Popplewell, Executive Director Core Services at Barnsley Council

Supporting People Through Change

From the outset, we focused on enabling Barnsley Council’s Children’s Services teams to take greater ownership of their digital environment, ensuring that change didn’t just happen around them, but with them.

As a neutral third party, we created the space for teams across IT and frontline services to come together, share perspectives, and shape a shared way forward. Our role was to listen, understand pain points across the organisation, and reduce friction, helping to shift conversations away from frustration and toward constructive problem-solving.

We encouraged empowerment at every level by:

• Rebuilding trust and capability at the operational level, enabling teams to collaborate directly and resolve challenges without defaulting to senior escalation
• Acting as a neutral facilitator, helping surface business concerns constructively, without blame, and ensuring all voices were heard
• Introducing the concept of product ownership and backlog development, giving business teams more clarity and control over how improvements were shaped and prioritised
• Clarifying decision-making boundaries, distinguishing where business-led vs. technical decisions should be made, and helping teams work more effectively together
• Improving mutual understanding of change processes, including how supplier releases might affect service availability and how IT needs to balance stability with responsiveness

By helping the organisation embed not just a system but new behaviours, mindsets, and ways of working, we supported a genuine cultural shift—one where Children’s Services teams felt informed, engaged, and central to shaping how technology supports their impact. The result: a stronger, more equal partnership between IT and frontline teams, and the confidence across the organisation to not only own the solution, but continually evolve it.