Star difficulty ratings

In producing the policy objectives and their associated tasks we have developed a simple star rating system to help you decide whether a particular task is something you might want to undertake yourself or one for which you want to appoint a consultant.

The system is based the level of complexity of the task and / or the amount of time and resource required to complete it.
 
A one star task represents a piece of work which has is technically straightforward and / or should require only a limited amount of resource to complete.

A two star task represents a piece of work which will require a technical understanding of the issues addressed. It may also be a more time-consuming element of work and you may therefore want to think about the level of resource you have available to undertake the work.

A three star task requires specialist knowledge and experience to complete, and you should seriously consider appointing a specialist consultant to carry out this work on your behalf. Should you decide to attempt this work in-house, make sure that whoever is given responsibility for it has undertaken this kind of work previously. As this task is also likely to take a significant amount of time and effort,  you should ensure that you have sufficient resources to allocate to it.

It isn’t possible to be more specific about the amount of time involved for each star rating as this very much depends on the task in question but nonetheless, it should be a useful guide.

We recognise that irrespective of the level of complexity of a task, you simply may not have the resources to complete any of the tasks outlined in the policy objectives. To assist you, we’ve produced a model brief module for each task identified in the toolkit which you can use to commission consultants to help you with creating your evidence base and developing your policy. See the Model Brief Introduction for more information.