Results-focused Project Design and Management » Uncategorized

The Power of Facilitation

admin — Tue, 19 Jul 2011 09:02:44 +0000

The representatives from the Ministry of Planning and Investment (MPI), Government of Vietnam, illustrated the struggle to generate concensus on a Project Design presented during the Training of Facilitators workshop, held in Manila, Philippines (27 June – 6 July 2011).

Quality of Development Assistance: How Donors Stack Up?

admin — Mon, 11 Oct 2010 01:17:46 +0000

Which is better: Bilateral or Multilateral Aid? Who among the donors deliver “good” aid? Who are the worst performers? These and many other related questions were the reasons for the Center for Global Development and the Brookings Institution’s Global Economy and Development program to do the Quality of Official Development Assistance (QuODA) assessment. QuODA is a new tool that tracks and compares donor programs against four dimensions of aid quality. Aid quality is assessed using 30 indicators grouped in four dimensions that reflect the international consensus of what constitutes high-quality aid. The four dimensions are: maximizing efficiency, fostering institutions, reducing burden, and transparency and learning.

You can use the Quality of Aid Diamond to compare rankings across the four dimensions of aid quality. Zero is the average score: values outside the diamond are better-than-average and those within are worse. Explore Quality by Dimension or Quality by Donors to learn more. Current data were provided by 23 donor countries and more than 150 aid agencies.

You can visit the QuODA site (http://www.cgdev.org/section/topics/aid_effectiveness/quoda) to view the results online or you can download the file (http://www.cgdev.org/files/1424481_file_CGDQuODAprepub_final3.pdf). The file also explains how scores were calculated.

Now, where in the list did your current aid provider belong?

Contributors Notes: Ed Canela is a COSO consultant and one of our website’s active contributors. He builds aid management systems, perform evaluation and impact analysis. He likes e-Learning and e-procurement.

Developing capacities for country Monitoring & Evaluation system

admin — Thu, 23 Sep 2010 08:47:21 +0000

UNICEF, IOCE and DevInfo, in partnership with UNDP, WFP, UNIFEM and ILO are pleased to announce a series of live webinars on “Developing capacities for country M&E systems”. Authors of the newly published book on this subject (available at http://www.mymande.org/?q=virtual ) will present their contributions and will be available to respond to your questions.

Webinars are free and open to interested people. You may attend virtually from your personal or work computer anywhere in the world. In addition to watching live presentations, you will have the option to ask questions and provide comments.

This conference will enable the sharing of good practices and lessons learned. Global-level speakers will contribute international perspectives.

Specific invitation – with detailed instructions – for each of the Monthly event will be sent out the week before the event. For additional information, please contact Marco Segone, UNICEF Evaluation Office, msegone@unicef.org

Contributor’s Note: Ed Canela is a COSO consultant and one of our website’s active contributors. He builds aid management systems, perform evaluation and impact analysis. He likes e-Learning and e-procurement.

Visualizing Stakeholders’ Stakes

admin — Fri, 17 Sep 2010 05:40:46 +0000

One of the important factors that can make or break projects is the stakeholders’ involvement. So are they really important as most planning exercises claim? As an observer, trainer and evaluator of development projects, I believe that the stakeholders’ participation has always been an enigma. They are visible in the beginning and at the end of a project…but nowhere to be seen in the middle! This should never be allowed to happen. Even for small projects. As a group, stakeholders is the nexus between projects and policies.

As an evaluation expert, how would you evaluate the relations between the stakeholders and the project? How would you assess their impacts on project management? Can we visualize their contributions? Fortunately, the answer to all the question is yes! One such tool was borrowed by the M&E practitioners from the ICT is the ONA. It examines how the stakeholders relate with one another as they eventually build participation, commitment, and ownership.

Organizational network analysis (ONA) is a set of tools that provide managers and evaluators with a visual map of the connections between and among stakeholders and the ley actors of development projects. It also provides quantitative data (measures (http://www.orgnet.com/sna.html) including centrality, betweeness, closeness, centrality, etc.) that substantiate the maps and their underlying patterns. Interviews conducted before and after the data gathering analysis ensure that the data are positioned in the context of the project and will not be misinterpreted or misused.

How? Stakeholders of a project respond to a questionnaire containing questions like:

(a) How often do you receive information from each of the others in this project that you need to do to your work?

(b) How well do you understand the knowledge, skills, and experience of each of the other stakeholders in this project?

Software analysis of the responses results in visual and quantitative views that provide the basis for organizational intervention and individual action.

Network analysis can be an effective diagnostic and planning tool for the development of communities of practice and relationships among the key actors in the project context.

The data gathering and analysis provide a baseline against which you can plan and prioritize the appropriate changes and interventions to increase the social connections within the organization, thus effectively building social capital.

You can read more here (http://networkweaver.blogspot.com/).

Vietnamese Results-focused Project Design and Management Workshop Wraps up With 27 New Graduates

admin — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 18:04:07 +0000

A training workshop in Results-focused Project Design and Management has been delivered for 27 Vietnamese participants from various provinces and various government oversight and executing agencies. The training was fronted by a 3-man team of facilitators, namely Do Minh Hoai, Hong Anh Chu, and Hong Anh Nguyen, all graduates of the PPMS Training of Facilitators in various occasions: Do Minh Hoai (TOF Hue 2009), Hong Anh Chu (TOF Hua Hin 2007), Hong Anh Nguyen (TOF Luang Prabang, 2009).

The participants were trained in different tools used in the conduct of participatory planning and management, including stakeholders analysis, problem and objectives tree analysis, and the results chain. The active participation by the trainees showed their keen interest to truly learn and practically apply the processes in their respective projects.

The workshop successfully closes today with 25 Vietnamese public servants earning not just certificates but more importantly, valuable knowledge and skills they can use to ensure good project design and ultimately project success.

World Bank Shares Concepts on Government Learning

admin — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 02:26:58 +0000

The Independent Evaluation Group of the World Bank recently released a publication entitled “The Black Box of Governmental Learning, The Learning Spiral-A Concept to Organize Learning in Governments”. The publication aims to address the problem on how best to educate the government with lessons from the past.

Government is not known to be the best learner from past lessons and as a result, resources are wasted, services are undelivered, and most of all, the citizens, especially the poor, are denied of social, legal and economic protection. It is for this reason that the need to educate the government of these lessons has become more crucial than ever. WB identifies the reason why government seems to never ever learn, and this is said to be because learning in government settings is hard to execute and conceptualize, and hence, the term “black box”.

This book introduces a theory-based concept that has been applied successfully over the past decade in a number of conferences and events comprising civil servants and staff of government all over the world.

Download the book.

Regional Training on Results-focused Project Design and Management in Cebu Closes Today

admin — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 06:22:50 +0000

Team 5 in serious discussion about their design summary

This 5-day workshop, organized by COSO, brought together 33 participants from Afghanistan, Indonesia, Nepal, Pakistan, the Philippines, Samoa, Tuvalu, and USA. It is designed to provide project directors and managers with immediate assistance in designing and managing projects for development results.

The training covered lecture and practice sessions on participatory planning tools for the development of the design and monitoring framework, as well as new topics on change management, implementation planning and monitoring and evaluation.

The training ran from 31 May until 4 June 2010.

One of many activities during the workshop was captured on video below.

First Results-Focused Project Design and Management Training in 2010 Scheduled in June

admin — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 03:11:57 +0000

Alas, after months of waiting and the uncertainty of it happening at all this year, a 5-day training on Results-focused Project Design and Management is finally scheduled on 31 May – 4 June in the Philippines. The training takes us down south to the island of Cebu and will be offered to executing agencies, implementing agencies and oversight agencies of the Philippine government.

The training now slightly veers away from the intensive 9-day facilitation training done in the past, and has recently undergone some curricular revisions, mainly highlighting the tools for participatory results-focused project design and management, but still keeping the values subsumed under change management, conflict management and participatory planning.

Being the only training to be delivered in the English language this year, this run also brings together participants from other countries (AFG, INO, NEP, PAK, USA).

Visualizing Systemic Change

admin — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 09:15:46 +0000

Systemic change is an interesting metaphor. It shows how a small change can trigger a series of other small ones that eventually ends with a big bang. It is not only difficult, it is a really complex process. Where do you begin? In the end going to start. Or the other way around? How will you get into the big change? Use small and incremental (almost unrecognizable) changes first and then lead to the big ones. How do you select those small changes? Which is the smallest change that can trigger the big one? What would connect one small change to the rest? What connectors will you use? What are the triggers and receptors for those connectors? Then, there is the timing. How long a time in-between the incremental changes would you need to trigger the next wave of incremental changes? Will they all connect as if they were orchestrated? Very complex indeed! Yet, many change agents, development facilitators and leaders casually suggest actions that lead to systemic changes! Do they really understand what they say as an electrical engineer would?

IAF Global Flipchart January 2010 is Now Available

admin — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 02:44:21 +0000

IAF Global Flipchart, the International Association of Facilitators’ official newsletter, has already released its very first issue for 2010 which includes:

- Member of the Month, Jon Jenkins, Groningen, The Netherlands,

- News from Professional Development

- Candidates for Editor of the Global Flipchart

The issue also shares a technique called Organization’s History, which is an activity that helps a facilitated group capture an organization’s history.

To read the issue, click here.