Departments will monitor entities their Minister is responsible for, unless the Minister directs otherwise and clarifies who will undertake monitoring instead of the department.
Monitoring departments should have explicit agreements in place with their Minister setting out their monitoring responsibilities. Where a department has notable monitoring responsibilities, its output plan should reflect this by covering the:
- specific tasks that will be undertaken
- monitoring priorities, including any risks and opportunities faced by the entity
- relationship management arrangements
- level and type of monitoring capability that will be sustained
- kind of information and analysis that will be provided to the Minister, and
- frequency with which the above information will be supplied.
Where a department monitors a group of entities in a sector, monitoring agreements and outputs should state the advice and analysis to be provided to the Minister on how well the agencies in the sector are working together. This will include:
- the effectiveness and efficiency of cross-agency initiatives
- whether there are gaps in delivery or expected results, and
- what changes are needed to ensure better integration.
