News archive

Covalent Software, one of Taunton’s fastest growing companies, takes on more staff to prepare for extended growth into new markets in the next year.

TAUNTON, 12th January 2006 - Covalent Software continues to grow and develop its team following extensive success in 2005. With a rapidly expanding Local Authority customer base, Covalent has now extended its team and made first and significant inroads into the Housing Association Market. Covalent was launched late in 2003 with just 2 staff; by the end of 2004 numbers had risen to 11 employees. Now at the start of 2006, Covalent has grown to 28 staff having doubled its customer base during 2005. (more…)

Covalent team expands to keep up with market demand.

TAUNTON, 5th July 2005 - Covalent Software has almost doubled the size of its team during 2005, to service a rapidly expanding Local Authority customer base. Covalent was launched late in 2003 with just 2 staff, by the end of 2004 numbers had risen to 11 employees and a recent recruitment drive has brought the team number up to over 20. (more…)

New Covalent research finds no relationship between BVPIs and CPS assessments.

TAUNTON, 3rd December 2004 - A new research study published today by Covalent Software explores the relationship between the two available frameworks for assessing the performance of a District Council (DC) - the Comprehensive Performance Assessment (CPA) result and the scores on Best Value Performance Indicators (BVPIs).

Whilst CPA takes a far more comprehensive approach to assessing council performance than the more limited BVPIs scores, intuitively one would expect a fairly strong relationship between the results from both approaches. Certainly from the citizen viewpoint, when presented with these two perspectives for assessing performance, there will be an expectation that both results will broadly indicate whether their council is a good performer or not.

In fact, Covalent’s research found limited evidence of such a relationship. (more…)

Covalent launches the latest version of its performance management software.

TAUNTON, 22nd September 2004 - Covalent Software today announced the release of Covalent Council Performance Management (CPM) Version 2.0. First customers are going live on the new product in October 2004. This version caps a busy year for the Covalent software development team who in the last 12 months have also delivered the launch version of Covalent and Version 1.1 in April 2004. (more…)

Covalent team expands to keep up with market demand.

TAUNTON, 30th March 2004 - Covalent Software now has a dedicated team of 12 staff servicing the fast expanding Local Authority customer base for its innovative, web-native Performance Management software. From a standing start in September with just 2 staff, Covalent now has over 15 customers and has rapidly expanded all support teams to maintain pace with customer demand. (more…)

Covalent signs its tenth customer, just 6 months since launch.

TAUNTON, 27th February 2004 - Covalent Software today announced that Ribble Valley Borough Council has purchased its innovative, web-native Council Performance Management software product. This makes a total of 10 customers just six months after Covalent CPM was launched in September 2003.

A key reason for the strong market interest is that Covalent is the only Performance Management solution specifically developed for Local Authorities and no-one else. Therefore every council customer is strategically important and future product development isn’t going to be compromised by the demands of customers from other vertical sectors or international markets. (more…)

New Covalent research highlights performance management as the weakest theme in CPA assessments.

TAUNTON, 6th November 2003 - A new Research Paper from Covalent Software, Inspecting the CPA Inspectors, consolidates the lessons to be learnt from the first 156 Audit Commission CPA reports published (150 single-tier and county councils, and the 6 West Sussex District Councils).

The Covalent research found that Performance Management is the area of greatest weakness in the CPA assessments. Nearly 70% of councils were rated ‘weak’ on performance management (scoring a 2 or a 1), with only 7% (just 10 councils) being rated a top scoring 4 (meaning the council is ’strong’ on performance management). Furthermore, performance management was the theme with the lowest numbers of councils scoring either 4s and 3s, and the highest numbers scoring 2s and 1s. (more…)

Covalent launches web-based performance management software - first three customers due to go-live in October 2003

TAUNTON, 1st September 2003 - Covalent Software has today launched an innovative, web-native Council Performance Management software product, called Covalent CPM, that is designed specifically for Local Authorities.

The Covalent software consolidates all critical statutory and local performance indicators in a single, comprehensive web-based system that tightly links performance measures to the council’s priorities and operational strategies. It allows managers, members and performance unit staff to proactively manage performance by taking corrective action based on a detailed, up-to-date understanding of what’s going on across the council. (more…)