Organisational Development
A reflection on CCR's internal capacity to effect change.
An overview of the key organisational domains, principles, current questions and plans that are underway as CCR builds its institutional capacity to deliver its strategies and achieve its program results.
Organisational Dimension: Goal
Principle: In order to effect a national movement for change we first need to equip ourselves to consistently model the changes we want to see in our own thinking, behaviour and programmes.
Questions facing CCR:
- What is the clear added value that CCR offers to members and to professionals who work with and care about children and change?
- How can we incorporate young people as the leaders of tomorrow in our work and bypass the more entrenched attitudes of the status quo?
- Who should CCR be speaking to that currently we are not?
- How do we engage and sustain those who are already on board?
- How can we support members to feel that they are contributing to CCR?
Plans for 2011:
- Identify boundary partners and consult with them to understand what changes they would like to see in their own attitudes and behaviours (progress markers) - August / Sept 2011.
- Conduct a more in-depth stakeholder mapping to identify key individuals within Government, business and civil society that we should be engaging with - Sept 2011.
- Seek input from members about what services and communications they would like from CCR - to inform both our professional development strategy for members and the design of the bulletin board - June / July 2011.
Organisational Dimension: Culture
Principle: CCR takes a strengths-based approach to finding out what works in Tanzania and celebrating that.
Questions facing CCR:
- How do we effectively popularise the learning that is generated from our research?
Plans for 2011:
- Develop an Monitoring and Learning framework - August / Sept 2011.
- Develop an orientation system for staff and members and a system for keeping members up to date on learning that is emerging from CCR - August - Oct 2011.
Organisational Dimension: Environment
Principle: Structural, underlying and immediate forces all affect the experience of being a child in Tanzania. CCR catalyses significant and scaleable change for children by learning, sharing, and doing things differently.
Questions facing CCR:
- How do we systematically track national and societal reform processes?
- How do we learn from and amplify projects that build social capital?
- How can we find out more about the evolving norms that Tanzanians use to address the duality in which they live?
- How can we capture local knowledge about how communities already protect children?
Plans for 2011:
- Conduct research on care practices in Tanzania - May - Dec 2011.
- Establish an internal system for tracking the political economy, reflecting on our own understanding and revisiting our strategies - Sept - Oct 2011.
Organisational Dimension: People
Principle: CCR is a network organisation and is therefore dependent on the individuals who make the up the network, the quality of their interactions and the perceived value that they receive from CCR membership.
Questions facing CCR:
- What tools do we need to develop to orient staff and new members to CCR?
- How does CCR add value to the individuals who are members and the organisations whom they represent?
- How does CCR recruit skilled, committed and energetic Tanzanian staff?
- What are the skills and gaps in CCR and how do we recruit and identify how to fill them?
Plans for 2011:
- Develop systems and processes that better operationalise our HR policy - August - Oct 2011.
- Revisit all job descriptions and competency benchmarks for new staff positions to ensure that they are aligned with the results we need to achieve. Develop and implement a recruitment strategy - August - Oct 2011.
- Re-negotiate MOUs with members to clearly agree value to each organisation from CCR membership and identify tailored strategies for integrating CCR more clearly into their own operations - July - Dec 2011.
- Develop an approach to handling requests from volunteers and interns - what are our needs, can we link them to members, how can we more effectively support interns? Sept - Oct 2011.
Organisational Dimension: Relationships
Principle: We have to be the change we want to see and need to model in our own lives the type of relationships we want others to adopt.
Questions facing CCR:
- How does CCR support its own members and staff to embark on their own journeys of transformation?
Plans for 2011:
- Operationalise HR policies (See People)
- Create personalised professional development budgets and plans for each staff member, identify their training / mentoring / coaching needs and fulfil them - Sept - Dec 2011.
Organisational Dimension: Leadership
Principle: CCR’s leaders must ensure that CCR responds proactively to changes in its environment, and facilitate an organisational system and structure that enables CCR to achieve outcomes for children and members.
Questions facing CCR:
- How do we extract expertise that exists within CCR’s Board and further build it?
- How can we build further diversity amongst our leadership?
- How do we deepen the institutionalisation of CCR into member organisations so that we can expand our pool of leaders?
Plans for 2011:
- Strengthen the Board’s engagement at a strategic level of the organisation and ensuring that mechanisms are in place to support the Secretariat more effectively and hold them accountable more explicitly to the Board - Aug - Dec 2011.
Organisational Dimension: Roles
Principle: People are people, not roles. If we want to effectively achieve our goals we need people who are inspired and able to work at their best.
Questions facing CCR:
- How much can we realistically expect from CCR members and Board?
- How do we identify the strengths and gaps in the Board, CCR members and the Secretariat and respond quickly and thoughtfully with solutions?
- What are our expectations of our boundary partners and what can we offer them in terms of value?
Plans for 2011:
- Develop Board job descriptions - Aug 2011.
- Re-negotiate MOUs with members (See People).
- Re-energise the working group system - Aug - Dec 2011.
Organisational Dimension: Structure
Principle: Structure exists to help us achieve our goals and our people.
Questions facing CCR:
- How can we build a more distributed structure that reaches more people?
- How do the various constituencies of CCR contribute? How do we hear their voices? How do we add value to them? How do we all come together?
- How does CCR more intentionally design its structure around the strengths Tanzanians, rather than relying on foreign staff who have the typically Western set of skills and competencies, but have limited engagement with the real context of Tanzania?
Plans for 2011:
- Involve sub-contractors and members in more collaborative work - Aug - Dec 2011.
- Establish a bulletin board that would enable professionals within the children’s sector to collaborate and communicate more effectively - June - Sept 2011.
Organisational Dimension: Infrastructure
Principle: CCR is a network whose members are not always able to interact regularly in a face to face setting. We need to achieve a balance of virtual and face to face ways of engaging with each other.
Questions facing CCR:
- How does CCR maintain its principles and values in the face of others who may want to influence what CCR does and how it manages its operations?
- What is CCR’s fundraising strategy?
Plans for 2011:
- Develop a fundraising strategy for building a reserve fund - Oct - Dec 2011.
Organisational Dimension: Processes
Principle: CCR meets members where they are rather than where we want them to be. The Secretariat tries to take CCR to members, rather than always expecting them to come to CCR.
Questions facing CCR:
- How can we ensure that processes support each other and that we don’t spend so much time on process development that we don’t deliver?
- How do we develop an optimally powerful secretariat?
- What systems and processes need to be put in place for the Secretariat, members and Board to reflect on the effectiveness of our strategies and internal functioning in supporting us to achieve program results?
Plans for 2011:
- Establish processes whereby we can make collective decision making and have a regular space for the team to bounce ideas off - May - Sept 2011.
- Finesse our processes for planning & scheduling, costing, requesting funds, spending and reporting - May - Dec 2011.
- Establish an organisational process for understanding our priorities on an ongoing basis (As above).
- Improve and document a monitoring and learning framework - July - Sept 2011..
