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Reorganisation in SDC brought fourth a set of new or adapted tools aiming to optimize the impact of SDC’s work. From his personal perspective, a  former SDC colleague casts a critical eye on these tools and the capacity of  field offices to put them into practice and suggests a series of measures to tackle the related challenges.

By Denis Bugnard

During the last years I managed several Programme Cycle Management (PCM) training courses, I coached colleagues in Cooperation Strategy (CS) Monitoring, new tools issued from the SDC Reorganization II (Reo II) exercise and instruments in various continents and countries: Western Balkans, South Asia and North Africa and of course in Switzerland. Everywhere I have made more or less the same observations, which I’d like to share with you.

• Ways to approach the Cooperation Strategy Monitoring guidelines are quite different according to the experiences Swiss Cooperation Offices (SCO) and Field Offices (FO) people have had with such instruments. Frequently people are not confident enough with terminology such as Result Framework, Synopsis, Logical Framework, Impact Logic, and of course Outcomes and Ouputs;

• It seems that SDC is actually investing time and energy to beautiful the roof of the house (in other words to improve the quality of results) but forgetting that the basement of the house is deteriorating inexorably;

• The time invested in developing a Cooperation Strategy Monitoring system in each Swiss Cooperation Office and Field Office is huge and I seriously doubt if such time has been well invested. I had the feeling that SCO people “have to” formulate a CS monitoring, but for what, for whom, to do what, are among the open questions. When people are not confident with the basement of the PCM system, and especially Monitoring mechanism, to develop a Cooperation Strategy Monitoring is a joke. To understand the Cooperation Strategy Monitoring guidelines requires a 3-day training course at least, it is largely not enough to send the tool to concerned people or to edit it in Intraweb. I experienced that in North Africa. Better would be to advice SCOs to manage a partners’ day to collect results in terms of outcomes and outputs directly from partners. They will learn much more than applying a Cooperation Strategy Monitoring with countless indicators.

• The large set of SDC instruments – new ones or partially updated even retooled – that SCOs and Field Offices have to use might have some dramatic consequences in term of outcomes of the SDC programmes and projects:
- the calendar is mostly dictated by the Head Office (for instance Financial Expenditures in February, Office Management Report in April, Internal Control System in June, Annual Report in September/October), and less by the context and even worse by partners’ priorities;
- Swiss Cooperation Offices and Field Office’s priorities might have been shifted towards “reporting to Head Office” from development partners’ priorities, opportunities and innovations ;
- time to be invested in field visit, coaching, support and advice has dramatically been reduced putting people in paperwork rather than in listening to realities;
- in fact many SDC people in the field have only partially been informed about the Reo II and its consequences. They have to know why, how and what it is about to be able to answer to partners’ questions regarding new procedures, requirements and instruments.

• Quality of key document: it is a real problem for both sides. On the one hand, the quality criterions are largely dependent on the Head Office responsible person (e.g. head of Division) who likes or doesn’t like the formulation of an Entry- or Credit Proposal on his/her own. On the other hand, SCO people are not trained properly to write such key documents, or SCO Management has not enough time – even expertise – to coach Programme Officer, or competencies to assess a Project Document (ProDoc) efficiently. The lack of confidence in developing a joint, clear, achievable planning tool such as a logical framework is a reality.

• In addition to that I was dramatically surprised that many Swiss Cooperation Offices and Field Offices do not have proper and adequate management instruments. That is why it is difficult to fix their own priorities in order to protect themselves against too many unplanned demands, to know where to put energy and emphasis, where to book time and when to say “No” to additional requests.

• Status of documents put in Intraweb not crystal clear: if the SDC Quality Assurance Section makes a good work, sometimes it is not easy to recognize whether the document is a Quality Assurance Section’s proposal or a document endorsed by SDC top Management. It confuses our colleagues in SCOs and FOs.

• I am a little bit afraid that SDC orients itself towards a machinery to produce reports — reports which might not be reflecting the reality of the development work — if Swiss Cooperation Offices’- and Field Offices’ personnel has the feeling that Head Office must be satisfied by receiving reports on time.

• In addition to that, I was wondering about the – good – image and the SDC’s quality of work. It could be quickly damaged if no corrective measures are taken.

Some suggestions for the near future

• Re-build the foundations: continuous training on Programme Cycle Management (PCM) and procedures must be intensified, delivered yearly in each SCO or region, based on practical cases. They should not be theoretic and participants should be able to exploit the aquired knowledge and to pass it on to their colleagues in  Swiss Cooperation Offices and Field Offices.

• Quality Assurance Section people in each Department or Division should be able to deliver such training courses, maybe tailor-made according to the needs of the field.

• It is urgent and important to (re) build local capacities in Programme Cycle Management and procedures to ensure continuous training of Swiss Cooperation Offices’-, Field Offices’ and Partners’ project people.

• It is also urgent and important to simplify and as far as possible to uniform the SDC chain of command: which steps need to have a green light from Head Office and which not. Which document is considered as a joint document – for instance a ProDoc or a Logical framework developed jointly with local partners – and should not be modified by Head Office? And which one could be?

I am ready to give a hand in this regard.

By Riff Fullan

At an organisational level, efforts to support greater knowledge management and learning can get ‘stuck’ within a mechanistic approach, designing structures or tools when one of the most important things to think about is people and how we can create the right conditions for them to interact in productive ways. The idea of having a variety of staff playing pivotal roles in enabling greater knowledge transfer – in other words, having Knowledge Champions – is one that is well worth exploring as a complement to other institutional knowledge management efforts.

The field of Knowledge Management (KM) developed in the late 1980s and early 1990s in the corporate sector. Initially, energy went into the creation of information management systems because this was considered to be a crucial area where organisations could keep their ‘edge’. In the following years, not only did KM gain prominence in the development sector, but by the year 2000 the focus was also shifting to the importance of people and their roles in building, maintaining and propagating knowledge. One outcome of this was an increased interest in Knowledge Champions.

In many larger development organisations the ‘original’ Knowledge Champions were those in positions such as Chief Knowledge Officer or Knowledge Management Coordinator. Such positions indicated the importance to the organisation of knowledge and a (usually senior) person to steer organisational efforts to manage it.

The belief was that investing resources in a KM-specific position would ensure that the organisation would be a ‘learning organisation’. In the event, it was difficult to meet expectations for a variety of reasons, including:

• Inertia associated with pre-existing practices which often created barriers to knowledge sharing and learning
• A variety of (national, cultural, technical) contexts within organisations
• Relatively high fragmentation of internal systems designed to support KM

The Fate of Knowledge Champions

In some cases the response was to discontinue Chief Knowledge Officer-like positions, but in others it was recognised that a single person – or even a small team, especially if it is based solely in the head office – is simply not enough. Why? Because what is needed is to spearhead the changes in organisational culture required to move from a more bureaucratic way of doing things to one that is more dynamic, more accepting of different ways of working, and more open to outside influence.This is where the role of Knowledge Champions truly comes into its own!

Spreading the Knowledge Champion Wealth

A more effective approach to strengthening knowledge and learning within an organisation is to identify, support and promote Knowledge Champions in a variety of positions.

There are two major ways in which this can be done: by networking of staff based on a common (usually thematic) interest, and by identifying and supporting Knowledge Champions working in different positions and locations. SDC is currently doing the former: supporting a variety of networks with members in cooperation offices around the world as well as in the headquarters in Bern. Each network has a Focal Point who is responsible for not only providing thematic advice and expertise for internal and external policy dialogues, but also for helping to nurture and steer the network. The Focal Points – in addition to the Knowledge and Learning Process Division, which has overall responsibility for supporting knowledge sharing and learning – are key emerging Knowledge Champions in the SDC context.

Another approach is to identify individuals throughout the organisation with the right characteristics who can play the Knowledge Champion role. The advantage here is these Knowledge Champions are well integrated into their respective local contexts and are more immediately available to their colleagues than those based at headquarters. Disadvantages are that they are often difficult to identify, normally have pre-existing sets of responsibilities, and can be more isolated than a team working in the same place.

Some Approaches to Going the Knowledge Champion Route

How could SDC – and similar organisations – strengthen Knowledge Champions? Certainly, one way is to keep doing what it is already doing, i.e. providing resources and institutional backing for network Focal Points. Another is to actively explore the designation of some Focal Points who are based in Cooperation Offices. A third is to broaden the scope to encourage and enable ‘ordinary‘ staff to play a Knowledge Champion role. To do this, SDC would need to:

• Define how Knowledge Champions could be identified (e.g., through an internal Social Network Analysis to see who is already playing such a role)
• Determine how to balance informality and formality (on the formal side, at least there will need to be an explicit designation of individuals as Knowledge Champions). In addition, managers of those individuals will need to be supportive on an ongoing basis
• Clearly define the role of a Knowledge Champion (and distinguish it from positions within the KLP Division as well as from network Focal Points)

Why add yet another complication to an already complex institutional context? One reason is to create an additional mechanism to bridge the gap between initiatives driven by headquarters and those driven from the field. A second is that the degree to which SDC strengthens itself as a learning organisation is directly linked to the number of staff who are actively involved in making it happen: spreading the coordination/supporting role around is a powerful way to leverage enthusiasm and energy within the organisation around knowledge and learning.

What do you think about the importance of Knowledge Champions? Is the necessary investment worthwhile for development organisations? 

Further Reading:

Unit 4 of the Knowledge Sharing for Development IMARK Module includes an interesting description of Knowledge Champions at the operational level.

The 3Cs of Knowledge Sharing: Culture, Co-opetition and Commitment describes important elements of a knowledge-friendly organisational context.

This Knowledge Champion blog post provides a concise description of key ways to identify and benefit from Knowledge Champions and other approaches to knowledge sharing.

In our interview series “6 questions to…” we ask people from in and around SDC and the KM world the same 6 questions. Our goal is to offer insights into different working methods, different ways of looking at individual and institutional learning, and different ideas and opinions on how to make organizations more efficient… And, along the way, to hear interesting stories and experiences our interviewees have in store! (more…)

By Nara Weigel

In her first blog post A Treasure of SDC Experiences in Managing and Supporting Networks: 7 Guides to Make it your Own, Nara Weigel presented the interlinked good practice guides available on the website of the Learning and Networking Division. This blog post, explores two of the guides in more detail: nurturing networks and managing the membership of SDC networks. Two users of the guides share their first reactions, personal reflections and further lessons from their daily work as network focal point and backstopper. (more…)

By Nancy White

In our first part on accidental technology stewardship we focused on the technology acquisition and design issues. In today’s post we’ll look at what I think is the really fun stuff: how we build useful practices USING technology together. (more…)

By Dorothee Lötscher, Agridea

“We learn from suffering together” – this statement of a regional focal point of the Global Forum for Rural Advisory Services (GFRAS) expresses some of the key elements of learning in networks: multi-directional exchange between peers, collaboration based on trust and encouragement, and learning from cases. Networking is challenging and time-consuming, but leads to members’ moments of success, motivation, and finally sustainability. Intangible outputs play thereby an important role. Find below how GFRAS regional focal points and the GFRAS executive secretary experience their networking activities, how they deal with tangibles and intangibles, and what this might mean for networks in general. (more…)

HIGHLIGHT

Collegial Coaching is a process that draws on experiences and practices of professional colleagues in order to share new ideas, teach one another or solve a problem. Watch this entertaining clip to get a clear idea of the mechanisms of this useful tool. Or go to the Learning & Networking Website to get more information on Collegial Coaching.

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Interview by Carsten Schulz, Agridea

As with many things knowledge management starts with ourselves. Today’s interviewee Shakarbek Niyatbekov talks about his personal strategies, about knowledge sources and networks supporting him in daily work. He is working at the Swiss Cooperation Office (SCO) in Tajikistan since 2005. He started as a project manager at the Project Implementation Unit (PIU) of the SCO in Tajikistan. Later on after integration of the PIU into the main office he continued his work as National Program Officer responsible for the Rule of Law / Access to Justice projects funded by SDC in Tajikistan. (more…)

By Nancy White

How many times have you been faced with coordinating work, knowledge sharing or learning with a colleague who is not close by?  Of course, we have the magic of the internet, right? Which knits us across countries and contexts, right? Well, it could, but most of us lack the magic wand to make this happen flawlessly. There is a useful practice to picking and using technology in service of groups called technology stewardship. Let’s take a peek into tech stewardship together. We will focus here on definition and some design principles, and look at implementation practices in a second blog post. (more…)

By Kuno Schläfli and Nadia Lanfranchi

Last week the Democratisation and Local Governance Network (DLGN) and the Multimedia Group of SDC organised a workshop to explore and debate the potentials of incorporating visual methods in development cooperation. It was an occasion to dig deeper into the field, to gain insight on which possibilities open up if new communication technologies are integrated into social processes and projects. Thus, with respect to social reporting as an instrument to report collectively and in real time from face to face conferences or other events, the discussed methodologies go one step further. They aim at involving the real beneficiaries of development projects into the project cycle and seek to give them a voice and to enable others to listen to their stories. (more…)

By Nara Weigel, Helvetas Swiss Intercooperation

Why Good Practice Guides on Managing and Supporting Networks?

Three years after thematic networks were created within SDC, the Learning and Networking team felt it was a good moment to capitalise the organisation’s experience in supporting networks and make collective learning available to a broader audience. This was done in form of seven interlinked mini guides (illustrated below) on e-facilitation, nurturing networks, roles and responsibilities within networks, managing membership, linking face to face (f2f) events and online dialogues, social reporting on f2f events and planning f2f events. The choice of issues shows that the guides are not only relevant for network Focal Points and Steering Group members, but also for other people working at or with SDC. The guides can be viewed online or downloaded as pdf files from the website of the Learning and Networking Division. (more…)

By Adrian Gnägi

Manuel Flury recently published a post on changing perspectives as opportunities for learning. When Manuel and I went for overseas postings in the middle of 2011, we decided to continue writing posts for sdclan. We wanted to document how the change of work context affects our way of understanding things. I have written several posts since moving to Laos. They all related to my former work situation: the post on the political economy of result terminologies was inspired by a course on impact monitoring I attended back in July, the post I wrote with dlgn colleagues on the “learning project” methodology reflected on our joint capitalization work on donor support for sustainable municipal finances during the past 2 years, and the post written with Bertha Camacho in August reflected on experiences with e-discussion campaigns we made in February. (more…)

By Riff Fullan, Helvetas Swiss Intercooperation

“If many people from different hierarchies and countries come together there are always those who think they know less about a subject and participate less in the discussion. They may be afraid to say something wrong. To start with personal stories demonstrates that everyone has a valuable experience to share and we can share it in the language we feel comfortable” (reflection of SDC gender team member on using stories in a workshop context, SDC Story Guide, p. 30).

Conscious engagement with storytelling for knowledge sharing and learning began almost 10 years ago within SDC and was pursued with some energy, especially in the first years. (more…)

HIGHLIGHT

Improve your visualisation skills with Dilbert!

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By Manuel Flury

Haven’t we experienced it many times? Discovering new aspects while looking at things from a different angle? Colleagues ask us to review a text, we explain our children what we do in the office, we hold workshops outside of our offices, we meet colleagues in the cafeteria and hold meetings standing around filing cabinets, we discover new issues while jogging or taking a shower, we prepare a negotiation by arguing from the others’ position, we design a learning event in analogy with industrial car production, we think “out of the box”.

As a test: Do you manage to think “out of the box”? 9 points test
And here: the solutions to it! 9 points test – solutions

I am about to experience the change of my work context in three ways: (1) from working on methods and processes of learning and knowledge sharing to working on solutions to problems of food insecurity; (2) from working in a development agency to working in an Embassy; (3) from working (and living) in a European capital city to working (and living) in an African metropolis. Let me share with you two of my first learning experiences. (more…)

By Adrian Gnägi

A few weeks ago I participated in a training course on impact oriented monitoring and evaluation. The course really helped me organizing my thinking on managing development programs for impact. Time and money very well invested, I found. One critical moment for me was when one of the trainers presented an overview on results terminology. Even though her presentation was introduced with a Confucius citation (my translation: “if the concepts are not right, the order of things is lost”), she presented the 4 terminology clusters as “some do it like this, others do it like that”. I felt compelled to explain why I think this free choice of results terminology to be wrong. Since I was struggling to explain it in simple words, I decided to write it up. That’s what this post is all about: why results terminology matters. (more…)

In our interview series “11 questions to…” we ask people from in and around SDC and the KM world the same 11 questions. Our goal is to offer insights into different working methods, different ways of looking at individual and institutional learning, and different ideas and opinions on how to make organisations more efficient… And, along the way, to hear interesting stories and experiences our interviewees have in store!

Today: Angela Oberholzer, Finance Officer, SDC Division of Corporate Financial Planning and Consulting. (more…)

As with many things knowledge management starts with ourselves. Today’s interviewee Enkh-Amgalan Tseelei talks about her personal strategies, about knowledge sources and networks supporting her in daily work. As National Programme Officer (NPO) she has been working in the Swiss Cooperation Office (SCO) in Ulaan Baatar, Mongolia, from April 2005 to September 2010. Since September 2010 she is manager of the Green Gold Project of SDC Mongolia. (more…)

By Manuel Flury 

Almost ten years back I met with the „SDC AdFin Circle”, the group of financial administrators. These, mostly women experts in financial management of development projects met regularly in order to exchange on many practical aspects of their work. While the majority of them worked at the SDC Head Office, some were deployed to Cooperation Offices in our partner countries. Facilitating the exchange among all was on the agenda of this meeting and I was invited by the financial advisor to talk about practical possibilities of working with an electronic platform. This person wanted to know about possibilities of using an electronic discussion platform. While explaining the pros and cons of web and email based electronic platforms – that time SDC was turning to Bellanet’s Dgroups for hosting such platforms – one of the participants raised the issue as to who might subscribe to the platform. And she continued by saying to my astonishment: “If my boss discovers what question I ask, he might not be happy since I am supposed to know and not to have questions”!
Later I shared this experience with my Canadian friends from Bellanet and we wondered whether we encountered a cultural difference between Switzerland and Canada where he would exclude such a statement.

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by Kuno Schläfli, Romana Tedeschi, Katharina Walker, Michael Reimann, Matthias Boss, and Adrian Gnägi

SDC used to be structured as a matrix organization. Operational geographic units managed funds and local context, technical units managed thematic knowledge, and together they were thought to implement effective projects. This setup became perceived to have improvement potential. In 2008, technical units were replaced by learning and exchange networks. One of the justifications for this move was that guidance and policies elaborated by the technical units were sometimes perceived to be too abstract, too general, not enough evidence based. One of the expectations towards the newly created networks therefore was that their guidance should look, feel, and act differently – “experience based good practice” was the orientation received. This post documents one of the first attempts by one of the new networks to distill “experience based good practice”.

SDC’s “decentralization and local governance network” (dlgn) met for its first-ever face-to-face encounter in November 2009 in Delhi. (more…)

Tenders and offers seen through the lenses of learning and sustainability

by Ernst Bolliger Agridea / Team international

Preface: Preparing for an evaluation mission of SDC’s Mongolia Green Gold project (three key words: the Tragedy of the Commons – pasture management – herder associations) I have pictures of overgrazed pastureland, herds of cattle, goat, sheep, camels and horses in front of my eyes. In this vast landscape with generally scarce pastures there are some green spots, attractive for all herders to drive their herds for grazing.
Cut.
Change of the scene.

Some two years ago, a parliamentary audit made it clear: SDC does not follow the rules about public tendering of their mandates. (more…)

Any team or group of persons working on a common topic, e.g. a thematic network of SDC, needs to ensure mutual information about and participation in relevant issues and moments.  There are different ways to do this. Peter Reinhard, former head of the international team of Agridea* has his own personal way of information management by having “an open ear in the office”.  Discover his approach, its preconditions and limitations through Olivia Hartmann’s  interview, and find her own conclusions addressing  SDC collaborators.

by Olivia Hartmann, Agridea/Team International

Peter Reinhard, you have been workingin a shared office within the International Team of Agridea for long years, even in your function as head of that team and of other entities within Agridea. What is your first spontaneous thought when you hear “the open ear in the office”?

So many things happen in the office – a phone call here, a quick question amongst colleagues there. The open ear allows me to pick up a lot of information and grasp roughly what is going on without having to invest extra time…. Or at least I know where I need to invest more time to ask further questions.  

These are all positive associations. Are there any negative aspects of the open ear? (more…)

As in her  first post (cf. 17 July), Corinne Sprecher, Agridea/Team International, went to further look for champions  who consciously apply knowledge management-tools in their work.  In this article she relates and reflects on experiences  regarding learning from one’s own experience. 

by Corinne Sprecher

In this second post, SDC staff members share with us some more of their experiences and lessons of applying  Knowledge Management Tools in daily life. This time the focus is laid on learning from one’s own and others’ experience. (more…)

In our interview series “11 Questions to…” we ask people from in and around SDC and the KM world the same 11 questions.
Our goal is to offer insight into different working methods, different ways of looking at individual and institutional learning, and different ideas and opinions on how to make organisations more efficient… And, along the way, to hear interesting stories and experiences our interviewees have in store! Today: Anandsaikhan Nyamdavaa, National Programme Officer (NPO), Swiss Cooperation Office Mongolia. (more…)

by Bertha Camacho and Adrian Gnägi

Solution Exchange pioneered a structured way to conduct e-discussions, called “e-discussion campaigns with consolidated replies”. The structure of those e-discussions looks like this:

• A query is posted on the e-forum of a network and experience carriers are invited to post replies within a pre-determined time frame. Frequently, the moderator supports members with the wording of the query, making sure the query is short, easy to understand and appealing to be answered.
• Moderators lobby experienced network members to post replies in the e-forum. This lobbying is worked mostly over the phone. According to Solution Exchange, it is the major time investment of the e-moderator.
• When the discussion campaign is over, the e-moderator sums up the discussion in a “consolidated reply”. The e-moderator condenses the main messages into an easy-to-understand analytical summary and includes all individual contributions in full into the document.

This post reflects on the first “e-discussion campaign with consolidated replies” conducted by SDC’s “decentralization and local governance” network (dlgn) (more…)