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International Development Advisors |
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Building training and research standards for innovation and sustainable outcomes |
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Why Strides? Can it make a difference?
STRIDES is a new practical training and mentoring approach run by The STRIDES Foundation Ltd (UK) to support young- to mid-career research scientists based in low-income countries. These professionals play important roles in national and regional efforts supporting economic development through the sustainable use of natural resources provided that they are adequately supported. The Strides initiative is designed to enhance the likelihood of success in identifying local and other stakeholder needs and developing the research AND extension activities required for producing practical innovative solutions to challenges facing the sustainable use and management of biological and water resources.
The training is designed to encourage effective engagement of both stakeholders and scientific peers throughout the conceptualisation, planning and implementation of their joint research. Course groups made up of potential team leaders of collaborative cross-disciplinary clusters will be organised and methods demonstrated on project design to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of research activities to increase the likelihood of innovations to alleviate poverty, improve livelihoods and accelerate development.
The STRIDES platform focuses therefore on collaborative research teams rather than support for individual scientists. Drawing from the extensive experience of the STRIDES scientific advisory team over many years in evaluating project proposals as well as managing and evaluating implementation and outcomes for other research-supporting organisations, the firm conclusion has been reached that the best way to enhance the capacity of individual scientists is to support their interaction with other scientists and relevant stakeholders in well-assembled research teams.
Particular emphasis will be given to the ways in which project design can lower internal risks through a clear specification of the desired output, effective cost reduction, optimised timing and ways to ensure human resources have the requisite capabilities to carry out the tasks expected of them. These design elements are of importance in ensuring an efficient, effectiveand economic use of donor funds.
Most extension approaches to communication of new ideas and technologies to farmers, local communities, entrepreneurs and commercial organisations are, more often than not, insufficient to deal with the tasks in hand because what is produced by research projects has often not been designed to address specific stakeholder-defined needs. The uptake and use of research results is exacerbated where the extension and other research uptake services are absent or poorly resourced. A major issue is the failure to shape research and development output to combine technical feasibility, economic viability, environmental adaptation and social acceptance on a sustainable basis. This effort only results in success if the output(s) of research is/are identified by the final user as something which will benefit him/her and which will integrate into the prevailing “frames of reference”. The frame of reference and fortunes of producers are determined by the prevailing “bio-climate” and seasonal variations in the locality for which innovations are being sought. Technologies and techniques need to be adapted to these realities since sustainable production depends upon their being capable of integration in the ecosystem without degrading it.
Training will include the management of the key factors making up natural resources complexity and at the same time take into account stakeholder interests. This is made possible through the introduction of course attendees to the management of information to support Real Time Audit (RTA), an extremely practical approach to project cycle management that facilitates effective and sustained interactions between researchers and stakeholders. The system provides a transparent oversight of all activities and progress for research project team members, stakeholders, host institutions and donors. The resulting transparency engenders and supports appropriate levels awareness, shared responsibility and joint ownership for each actor in the innovation value chain.
The system also provides a transparent interface between donors and team members allowing a shared oversight of all events occurring within a project. This enhances a collective capability in securing a successful outcome as a result of the timely detection of changes in circumstances affecting research progress and thereby enabling rapid management responses. This helps reduce the risks of failure and raises the likelihood of successful project outcomes.
RTA’s administrative system also permits on-demand analysis and reporting from any part of the world on any aspect of individual project performance as well as on the status of donor project portfolios providing comparative project performance and impact assessments over periods of interest. It will therefore assist in raising the effectiveness of donor portfolio management and performance.
International science grant schemes which support young scientists tend to emphasise the development of scientific capacity and production of publications. While such funding can help to reduce the brain drain and enhance scientific capacity, there is a very great need to ensure that these scientists produce outputs that include innovations which will generate products and services of direct utility to the economy and society. STRIDES) is a combined training and research support service designed to transfer to young and mid-career researchers know-how in the identification of needs and the design and management of projects to develop practical innovative solutions in collaboration with stakeholders. It will achieve this through a new appropriately structured training content and approach. This concept document explains the potential benefits to donors of the Srtides initiative in terms of lowering financial risks and raising the effectiveness of donor portfolio management by improving the operational standards and management of budget support mechanisms in the research sector to increase the contribution of innovation to development.
Increasing the effectiveness of donor portfolio management
Young researchers in low- to lower-middle income countries often lack experience and training in project cycle management. This constitutes a cause for concern for donors wishing to ensure that funds are managed in an efficient and effective manner. There is, therefore, an overall strategic role for funding to take place within a framework that emphasises sound risk management. Key factors in reducing the risk attached to fund allocations are standards and procedures that provide a transparent basis for assessing:
· the thoroughness of project design including cost minimization, appropriate timing of activities, internal and external risk analysis, sensitivity analysis and a careful matching of human resources capabilities and experience to required tasks; · the quality of proposals in terms of relevance and potential development impact; and, · the reliability of effective support mechanisms for researchers during the whole project cycle.
(i) Raising potential innovation outputs through cross-disciplinary research
A fundamental aim in innovation cycle management is to assist researchers identify and develop significant, natural resource-based innovations that will benefit society. The diversity and complexity of possible natural resource-based opportunities is substantial. Therefore a Project Cycle Management system is required that includes a design process to identify the most efficient, lowest cost, timely and lowest-risk implementation option incorporating the effective management of people, finance, resources and time. A cross-disciplinary approach is required for the analysis of technical, economic, financial, environmental, social, community and policy implications. A direct and sustained communication with relevant stakeholders is also essential to identify potentially useful innovations.
There is a need to ensure funds are allocated to well-designed feasible projects. Good project management practice needs to ensure that the time dedicated to research is maximised whereas the time dedicated to the project management is minimised without compromising effective monitoring of critical processes and events. To avoid waste, there is sometimes the need to terminate funding when projects, for whatever reason, do not perform during their pre-designed phases.
Donors quite often do not specify the need to deploy information management systems as a requirement for funding. Host institution accountancy and procurement systems are often used to support some aspects of project administration. Conventional internal and external monitoring and evaluation (M&E) is usually applied to provide project progress oversight dependent on widely differing standards established by institutions and individuals who are not directly involved in the management of the project3. Typically an after-the-event M&E reporting system describes the project attainment on the basis of Log Frame indicators. However, the project options selected and that are described in a Log Frame are often not supported by adequate information on the project design process as well as the reasons for selection of options adopted, especially in relation to risk, sensitivity and sustainability1. M&E reports based on a Log Frame reference are often the only formal procedures used to provide feedback to donors. Information is often received too late to bring about necessary changes when projects are not performing and this has a direct impact on the efficiency and effectiveness in the use of donor funds. __________________________________________________ 1 For further details on the constraints imposed by LFA and M&E approaches see: McNeill, H.W. & Belko, F. “Towards More Effective Project Management”, George Boole Foundation, October 2011. (www.boolean.org.uk/publications.htm and the Sida paper “The use and abuse of the logical framework approach” November 2005, Oliver Bakewell & Anne Garbutt, SEKA – Resultatredovisningsprojekt.
“EU Project Backbone Strategy 2008”. Reforming Technical Cooperation and Project Implementation Units for External Aid provided by the European Commission. “Lessons Learned from Evaluation: A Platform for Sharing Knowledge” M. J. Spilsbury, C. Perch, S. Norgbey, G. Rauniyar and C.Battaglino, Special Study Paper Number 2 Evaluation and Oversight Unit, United Nations Environment Programme Nairobi, January 2007 _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________
There is therefore a need to standardise project management systems so as to integrate communications and information access to support design, financial and human resources management procedures that maintain a practical guide and support for the analysis of technical, economic, financial, environmental, social, community and policy implications. If funding organisations contemplated the implementation of separate information management systems for each project, the costs would be prohibitive. Fortunately the capabilities, existing standards and resources provided by the World Wide Web enable the deployment of standard online information system solutions that combine the lowest operational costs with the best capacity to sustain project quality. This enables a relatively sophisticated server-based system to support all projects representing a relatively modest overhead for each project.
(ii) New approaches to research support and its management
The foregoing possibilities open up the exciting option of a form of funding that can associate donors who promote best practice in project cycle management with institutions and grantees that recognise the importance of applying such standards5. Therefore grants would only be provided to qualifying proposals whose proposers undertake to subscribe to such standards so as to achieve a more effective risk management at project level. This will also include the agreement that donors will be able to maintain an effective ongoing oversight of individual project performance as well as across the whole donor project portfolio.
A central role of the online system is to provide the resources to help compensate for any deficiencies in researcher experience or lack of training in project cycle management. Free access is provided to an easy-to-use system. Carefully designed dialogues (forms) provide a step by step project design method that ensures that all relevant cross-disciplinary and stakeholder requirements are taken into account and appropriate decisions reached and recorded. In order to maximise the effectiveness of communication between team members and stakeholders, a process flow model (similar to a supply chain model) is used where each participant can take ownership of clearly specified elements. This approach can be used to model the designs of simple projects as well as larger complex projects in terms of disciplines involved and numbers of stakeholders. The process flow model provides a clear description of the activities required over the project time schedule, how they link together, the identity of individuals responsible for each of these activities and the funds devoted to each one. In addition to assisting researchers to design their projects to produce a final plan, the online system in those cases of proposals being accepted, remains as a project information management system to monitor, in real time, the execution of work and compare this with the agreed plan. Because it is online, the progress in activities can be monitored in real time by all stakeholders including host institutions and donors.
One important benefit of real time audit is to provide early alerts and analysis where projects are not meeting planned requirements facilitating a timely response to implement solutions thereby augmenting the likelihood of overall project success. This might involve the agreed reallocation of funds within a project to more appropriate uses with a view to achieving the original objectives. Such monitoring, analysis and reporting cycles in real time would replace the conventional ex post analysis and reporting. In cases where performance is clearly deficient, contractual clauses could provide the option for freezing further funds to the project. Therefore RTA also has a vital role to play in on-going project level management but it also has, in terms of overall financial management of the donor project portfolio, a role in securing an acceptable performance. This creates the need for an independent financial oversight function to provide decisions on questions of reallocations or withdrawal of funds.
(iii) Need for training to secure well designed research
Young scientists with relatively little practical experience often lack the necessary accumulation of tacit knowledge. This can be compensated by recognition of the importance of regular and meaningful contact with relevant stakeholders with practical operational experience. Through such contacts, the expressed needs of beneficiaries in societal and business communities in general can be identified at the conceptual stages of research leading to a research design more likely to generate implementable results. To succeed at research, the participation of stakeholders needs to be sustained throughout the project cycle and the stimulation and consolidation of a researcher mindset which cultivates talents for readily identifying opportunities for innovation. The latter is dependent on a variety of factors, the most important of which are appropriate guidance (mentorship) and leadership, practical experience in applied research, and learning and acquiring best practice on how to communicate effectively with the key stakeholders in the relevant economically viable supply chains that contain the research output-to-adoption transition.
It is important that researchers receive exposure to the state of the art analytical methods that are necessary to identify and organise stakeholders as well as learn to how to use online applications provided by the RTSA system for project design that facilitate the project design so as to prepare:
A well-defined output specification in terms of quantities and quality An adaptation of the ISO Process Approach (geared to efficiency and effectiveness) The use of critical paths The incorporation of a process of comparative design to expose project options and, in particular, covering manageable internal risk-related factors such as:
· Costs · Timing · Human resources capabilities and experience matching to tasks · Sustainability during implementation · Sustainability post-funding · The incorporation of a process of design support to expose project activity and output sensitivity to external non-manageable events (risks)
Because the use of the project design applications and semi-automatic in operation the raw data used remains in the RTA system and can be audited if need be.
The result of the training provisions is that donors receive farm higher quality proposals from applicants who are making use of state of the art decision analysis tools. The likelihood of receiving good proposals is greatly enhanced by this approach thereby reducing risks on the part of the donor and augmenting transparency so as to promote a clear and objective exchange of information at the proposal stage between applicant and donor representatives.
Completion of the STRIDES training course should be an indication of the exposure and understanding of the individuals concerned to modern project design methods. (iv) Impact of STRIDES project cycle management methods and standards on the quality and performance of donor portfolios
STRIDES will enable a more effective orientation use of research towards beneficial development objectives through the application of a comprehensive project design and management standards supported by RTA. Success will be based on development of new concepts, products and services arising from the application of a more effective integration of scientific research results with local knowledge. It provides a method whereby donors can support innovation through the encouragement of higher procedural standards in project design and management which secure an effective reduction in donor investment portfolio risk.
Copyright Nakhlatec 2017® 07 October 2017 |
