Introduction to using the PME tool for Programmes and Projects.
Introductory note
In this document we are going to describe a PME aid that has a number of objectives. First of all, it aims to simplify our ways of reading information on our projects/programmes. It also allows us to refine the monitoring of the project/programmes’ different results, indicators, objectives, activities and deadlines. Using all of it enables us to identify any gaps in our information, which thus leads to better steering.
One result is that it expurgates all the detailed description and narration from the programmes/project’s contents, which thus become a cold project engineering tool. Another result is that it makes us think in boxes. This is why, when using these tools, we also need to add texts using words, sentences, and why not veritable literature, to describe the full meaning of our actions, the complex mechanisms of the human relations forming the foundations of our project/programmes, the essential historical, macro, transversal, political dimensions, etc… of the subject in hand, in other words, all those things that tables are not able to do.
Before starting my description of the tool, I would like to draw attention to the limitations of this type of approach, in order that a tool remains a tool, and the map doesn’t become the country, as they say in France!
The aim is to manage the increasing complexity of our actions.
Let’s be clear about this : complexity is not synonymous with complication. The distinction between these two terms is fundamental. Many of the difficulties in the way we manage our projects/programmes come from the fact that we approach complex problems as if they were simply complicated.
Something complicated can require a great deal of effort to be understood. But with time, method, expertise and tools that carry out certain long and repetitive tasks automatically, we get there and end up mastering them completely. The financial management of a programme, for example, is made up of figures that we can process using mathematics and ultra-precise accounting applications. The growth in the size of the budgets for our activities, the increasing diversity in funding bodies, the requirements for more and more financial transparency makes this management increasingly complicated. New tools are developed; they are larger, more and more precise and require increasingly powerful computers.
But we get there. We always end up with full knowledge of how to manage the situation, we always end up by understanding the structure and the principles of a complicated system.
On the other hand, we never fully apprehend complexity. We can have an overall understanding of a complex system, we can name it and qualify it, but we will never be able to understand all its workings, anticipate all its reactions and behaviour. Reality is always potentially richer than we are able to imagine. In the sciences, the representations that we create of reality are called theories. They are just models to help us interpret this reality. There are development theories, social theories … They help us, but will always remain, by definition, incomplete.
Complexity is not a new phenomenon: it has been growing since the beginning of time, both in the nature and the organisation of human societies. What is new, is the intensity with which this complexity is felt by our societies today. The globalisation of economic exchanges make countries’ economies more interlinked and interdependent, new information technologies provide us with access to masses of information that is difficult to control, most of our development models are in crisis, the great ideologies have exploded. All this constantly weakens our certitudes and challenges our choices.
This phenomenon can be seen at Handicap International in the increasing technical diversification of our activities, the multiplication of our missions, the need to take an ever-widening range of stakeholders into account (from micro to macro, private to community-based, informal to institutional), the heightened requirements in terms of technical expertise, the ever-growing cultural diversity of the association’s workforce. All of this makes the managing of our programmes increasingly complex, and this complexity can sometimes cause us to break out in a cold sweat. Financial crisis, the search for a sense, the tightening up of the mandate, the strengthening of steering mechanisms… It is sorely tempting to regain control of the machine by rationalising, reorganising, specifying, sometimes by pruning back.
However, in spite of the haze and the fog that this growing complexity conjures up around us, alarming as it is to our Cartesian minds, complexity is synonymous with richness, openness, multiple possibilities, margin for error, and finally with our own absolute need for the unknown so that we can live otherwise than in boxes.
But this approach to complexity requires a conceptual revolution that has not really taken place yet. Descartes and Newton supplied us with a mechanical vision of how the world works. This enabled considerable progress to be made in the production of wealth and perhaps in fortifying our certitude. It still exists today, and although more and more often science is attacking complexity head on, our ways of thinking, in the West at least, remain Cartesian. And thus, so do our management and steering methods.
We can see this in the way the large international solidarity funding agencies are trying to contain the humanitarian explosion by creating norms, controls and standards. The famous Logical Framework is an example. The concept of programming and its corollary, the concept of objective, are central to what is now classic development project management. Their usefulness can not be denied as we have not yet explored any real alternatives capable of apprehending complexity, and these choices improve our ability to master what becomes complicated. But their usage is taking a vaguely totalitarian turn and producing perverse effects. Focusing our energy on the conquest of a future condition considered to be ideal (the famous general objectives where everything is better than it actually is !) can produce good results in terms of local efficacy, but we all see that when the number of stakeholders and the scale of the project become too great, our beautiful causal trees and objectives are only illusory descriptions. And hunched over our Logical Framework, we focalise on the means for attaining our objectives (sometimes without even knowing whether we have managed it) and are less alert to evolutions in the environment and to those many stakeholders who participate more or less directly in the projects.
And yet all projects are moving targets because they are alive. In a mobile environment, with mobile, indeed elusive, stakeholders, we need to be able to devote part of our energy to looking around us and studying the changes, which should make us modify our attitudes and reconsider our objectives. The fact that a Logical Framework, for example, could be contractually binding for a funding body is an aberration! This implies that the operator guarantees to produce a given future situation and thus a fixedness in the environment in which the project teams are working. In order to escape from this situation, we need to increase our capacity to permanently analyse the environment and its impact on the project. This is why defining immovable objectives forces us to produce Monitoring and Evaluation tools for attempting to measure the extent to which we may wander off the ideally plotted course, in order to understand why we are wandering off it! To sum things up, we set ourselves compulsory objectives, we know we will not attain them and we surround ourselves with PME safeguards in order to be able to justify this scientifically!
But let’s not make snide remarks. In the absence of the capacity to incorporate complexity into our approaches, PME provides us with the means to constantly measure the limitations of the classic approach. This is already a big step forward ! And in the absence of a Vague Logical Framework, it is important to have a few mechanisms that allow us to better comprehend our environment.
I think that the creation of the Methodology TCU should enable us to maintain this constant reflection, which mission teams, through their cultural diversity, should aliment. We will not join the ranks of those who reject the "managerisation" of the association and are alienated by frameworks, boxes and figures. On the contrary, we believe that in order to handle complexity, we need to create a framework so as to know that we can then get out of it. Frameworks reassure, being outside of the framework is stimulating. We need both, and it is our managers’ role to make us navigate from within to without.
The following pages provide you with another framework. Please take note of it and get out of it quickly!
The PME team
The existing PME tools
In addition to the requirement to improve the steering of our activities, the following arguments also determined the choices made:
Ö We should not create new tools as we already have tools in our steering systems;
Ö We should simply improve those that exist to make them more useful to PME (50% of the FPD consulted said they did not use the existing tools in carrying out PME );
Ö We should avoid complicating the tools. These should correspond to a standard minimum that should also allow summarised information to be exchanged between different Handicap International services. We should therefore be aiming to simplify.
The 3 tools are :
The Pluri-annual Strategic Framework (PSF)
Incorporated in which is: The Programme Action Plan (PAP)
Incorporated in which are : The Logical Frameworks (LF) of the Programme’s Projects
The three main limitations to the existing system
1. The use of WORD documents makes it difficult to use the tables included in the documents as steering tools.
2.
Separate PSF, PAP and Project documents make it harder to obtain an overall vision and coherency. The dual identification of strategic objectives in the PSF and annual objectives in the PAP undermines overall coherency. These objectives should be identical.
3. The tables are essentially programming tools in which we enter expected results, deadlines and activities to be implemented. There are no real Monitoring tools.
The suggested improvements
Resultant modifications to our management tools
Resultant modifications to our Programme management tools
Resultant modifications to our Project management tools
The real changes are at project level, as we suggest adding to the Logical framework:
1. an Observation stage that summarises using the causal tree and the analysis of the stakeholders in the project’s environment;
2. a Programming stage, via the Logical framework and the Time chart;
3. a Monitoring stage, using the Monitoring matrix.
… and that the 3 stages summarised in the Excel tools be transparent and accessible to Handicap International staff members (ODP, DO, FDP, PM, TC, etc…)
The narratives that accompany the tools
Given that the Excel tables empty the Programmes/Projects of all their narrative contents, and that this aspect remains an important one, we need to retain certain narrative reference documents in order to have a detailed and historical understanding of the projects.
We will therefore be keeping:
Ä the narrative sections in the Pluri-annual Strategy documents;
Ä the programme summary sheet ;
Ä a project narrative (funding bodies format or other);
Ä a project summary sheet.
In other words, 4 Word documents will be part of the PME kit and their narrative and historical dimension will make them essential reference documents for our institutional memory and for capitalisation purposes.
These documents already exist!
Reporting frequency for the new tools (including financial)
In conclusion
We hope that these new tools will be of help to all Project Managers, Desk Officers and Field programme Directors in carrying out minimum but quality steering of our projects/programmes. Using Excel leaves an opening for improvements that are certain to follow. It also leaves a lot of freedom in the way the tools are used as nothing prevents you from adding columns, lines, tabs or formulae for the specific requirements of particular projects or programmes, which you can then mask, if necessary, when sending out the tools.
Standardisation of a required institutional minimum means they can be distributed to the different head office services and exploited according to individual needs (extractions of pages for the monitoring of support missions or training, for example).
This document was an introduction to 2 Excel files, "PME Programme.xls" et "PME Project.xls" that you are about to discover. They have not yet been completely finalised. Certain tasks are still manual and we will be able to automate them, and zones in the tables need to be locked to avoid errors in manipulation. But what counts is that you can see the suggested contents and make any remarks. For this purpose, at the bottom of each table and for each tab we have included a “Users’ guide” box giving a brief explanation of how to use each table.
The "PME Programme.xls" file has been filled in to provide an example using Russia’s PSF and PAP. The transfer to a Logical Framework presentation, however, leaves some boxes empty (marked with a «?»), whereas others are not necessarily relevant. We can see therefore that the logical approach will make us be more precise and more concise. I think that is what we are all looking for.
If you have any questions, please contact Philippe Villeval
Extension: 67 75