sdclan

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…)