Date: 2025-05-02 Page is: DBtxt003.php L0913-TVM-MMW-000013
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TrueValueMetrics ... Peter Burgess Manuscript
Making Management Work for Relief and Development |
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Chapter 13
Get Facts |
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Get Facts
Before you plan ... get the facts The relief and development sector projects often include “baseline studies” as the first phase of the project. But getting the facts needs to be a step before the project is designed. This writer advocates for a process that looks like this: ➢ FACTS ---> PLAN ------------------> IMPLEMENT ---> SUCCESSrather than a process that can perhaps be described like this: ➢ PLAN ----> 1st Phase Implement ---> FACTS ----------> OOPSThere are a lot of facts, but they are not easily accessible, nor are they very well organized. Before there is any planning, there needs to be information. This is obtained by measuring. Broadly speaking the more measurements the better. Some of the key information that is always needed:
Getting facts for planning is a legitimate activity ... but only to the extent that the effort is going to result in a plan. And the planning is only a legitimate activity if there is a reasonable possibility that it will result in a funded initiative. Getting good facts is valuable if it enables the plans developed to be the best possible. It is also very valuable to have facts before resources are consumed in bad investments. Spending a modest amount of money on getting facts so that a lot of money is NOT spent in a way that would fail and be wasted is very valuable. It needs to be common practice rather than unusual. Some years ago, I did a fisheries investment plan and evaluation in West Africa for IFC. When I proposed the project I had limited facts, and suggested a small study to see whether the plan might possibly be viable. I thought a field visit of about one week for one person would be enough. If there was potential, then it would make sense to do a full scale investment proposal. But no, that is not the way the IFC worked. Instead of one person for one week, it had to be four people and take several man-months. All the people had to have high level qualifications and experience (that is they were going to be expensive) and the report needed to be done to a presentation quality. Eventually, the study money is spent, the facts analyzed and it is apparent that my proposal was only half right. The fishery would support a project, but the enabling governance in the country was going to be catastrophic. My conclusion was that the proposed project should not go forward. Of course by now the IFC had spent a lot of money in the pre-project mode. IFC was embarrassed. I was pressured to change the conclusions, and then became unpopular because I refused to do so. It was not good for my consulting career! This shows the value of getting some preliminary data at low cost before going on to bigger things. I was professionally justified in our team's conclusions when two years later the World Bank chose to withdraw from the country for all the reasons we had identified as potential problems for the project. You only need to measure enough to be able to understand the difference between progress and regression ... and to have enough information so that the best possible decisions can be made. Getting extra facts and making plans that are never used is a value destroying activity. There are costs and no value. There can be substantial improvement in the performance of the relief and development sector if the reports and studies that are commissioned are only ones that are going to be used. The donor community is far too comfortable doing studies that have absolutely no relief and development value, but serve simply to employ nationals of the donor country. The academic community is happy to oblige, and during the summer break academics are to be found all over the “south” doing research and studies that rarely have much relief and development value. Getting facts ought to be easy Getting facts ought to be easy, but it is not. The management information needed is just not easily accessible, even if it exists at all. There are a number of problems that need to be addressed, including: (1) the academic practice of being secretive about the data; (2) the basic lack of relevant data collection; (3) the practice of doing very small samples and using statistical method for analysis; (4) The basic lack of relevant data collection is systemic. The academic practice of being secretive about the data, though promoting the conclusions derived from the data, may be something to do with the way in which academic credentials are evaluated and awards made. The effect of the practice is to make use of data much more difficult, and the reduce the socio-economic value of the academic efforts. The practice of doing very small samples and using statistical method for analysis is academically satisfying, but in terms of management information tells decision makers very little. There is a Need logical organization of management data There is no logical organization of management data for relief and development sector decision making being used. Nobody knows where to look for the data. There is no universal metadata system so that the data are comparable. There is text ... a lot of it. There are few numbers, and the numbers are difficult to understand. Nothing here is new There is nothing being suggested here that is new. The quest for more data has been on the agenda for a long time. The difference is that we are looking for decision making data, and not merely data that can be analyzed and included in some ad-hoc or annual publication. |
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