CARE Bangladesh

Program Quality Unit

Vision, Strategy and

Plan

Penultimate Draft

15 March 2007

Unit Staff:

Mary Picard, Consultant, (until 31 May ’07)

Laila Khondkar, Program Impact and Evaluation Coordinator,

Mehrul Islam, Program Monitoring and Learning Coordinator,

Kazi Shahinur Islam Depon, Information Officer,

Table of Contents

Page

Introduction1

Vision and Strategy2

Plan7

Annex 119

Introduction

Since the initial draft, the strategy, vision and plan for the Program Quality Unit of CARE Bangladesh have evolved over a four-month period and developed iteratively with taking initial steps in several areas of the plan. Although the process began early November 2006, the Program Quality Unit did not have on board the Program Evaluation and Impact Coordinator until early February 2007. This preliminary phase of launching the Unit, however, has made it possible for us to begin work on roughly 80 percent of the plan and to narrow the pool of ideas to those that are both feasible and essential in the next five years. A two-page annex captures those ideas that will either be led by another part of CARE or will be put on hold.

The final set of actions / initiatives in the plan, as described herein, have been vetted and validated through multiple means with various stakeholders in CARE. A couple taskforces have also been created to work collectively on major pieces of work, such as information management. Indeed, no initiative will be conducted exclusively by the Unit; much emphasis is being given to working collaboratively towards embedding responsibility for program quality & learning throughout the organization. And persistent effort is needed to bring the message of the Unit to all field offices in CARE.

Not only is the Unit new but most of the actions being proposed are about introducing changes to behaviors, practices, assumptions, work routines, and ways of thinking. While they will build on existing good practices, they will require individuals, teams, and the organization as a whole to make changes. Some of the initiatives, such as the use of long-term impact statements, have broad implications for how we organize our work now and in the future. Other initiatives are small, incremental changes such as the creation of informal learning spaces. But all are essential to the endeavor of fostering a learning culture in CARE BD. The plan may seem ambitious but we do not intend to tackle everything at once; what we will do is set in motion a plan and change process for each major initiative with the expectation that other Units and players within CARE will assume greater responsibility for these, as well as initiate their own actions. Further, many of the initiatives will draw on external consultant assistance as well as from CARE USA or the RMU for the initial push and ongoing support.

It is our hope that the next five years will see significant strides in our program quality & learning agenda. A separate document identifying the milestones and timeline for these actions is available. Soon to follow is the monitoring plan for the Unit and the Strategic Direction.

CARE Bangladesh Program Quality Unit1

Vision and Strategy

The Program Quality Unit was created to support the operationalization of the CARE Bangladesh’s Strategic Direction 3 in its Long-Range Strategic Plan (LRSP), 2007 – 2011.

Strategic Direction 3: CARE’s organizational culture will promote learning, knowledge sharing, and excellence in programming, enabling staff and partners to understand, demonstrate, and measure impact on the underlying causes of poverty and social exclusion.

More broadly, the Program Quality Unit will advance the understanding and operationalization of the LRSP Mission:

Mission: CARE Bangladesh amplifies the voices of the poor and the marginalized in ways that influence public opinion, development practice, and policy at all levels. This occurs as the knowledge drawn from our grass roots and global experience is channeled through purposeful relationships with civil society, government, and the private sector.

The Program Quality Unit envisages a change process towards becoming a knowledge-driven organization and will thus contribute to CARE making improvements in:

  • Generating knowledge that is based on its field-tested experience in social justice and alleviating poverty
  • Generating credible information about the poor and from the perspectives of the poor of use to the diversity of responsible actors
  • Sharing our knowledge externally and internally in order to influence policy and increase impact
  • Producingdocument-able innovative development approaches and strategies that can be applied more widely in Bangladesh to increase impact on policy decisions and on reducing poverty and marginalization
  • Using both knowledge and experience to collaborate and work collectively with other organizations towards the same goals

In broad terms, the vision of the Program Quality Unit can be expressed as:

To achieve this vision, the Program Quality Unit will undertake responsibility for:

  • Bringing about a learning culture in CARE BD that will serve as the bedrock for enabling the organization to become knowledge-driven
  • Developing initiatives to support staff and partners in understanding, demonstrating and measuring impacts on underlying causes of poverty and social exclusion
  • Leading the measurement of progress in its organizational changes, particularly as it relates to Strategic Direction 3
  • Spearheading the creation of institutional processes for knowledge sharing with internal and external audiences
  • Transforming CARE’s practices in information management as part of the enabling environment for becoming knowledge-driven

The Unit’s strategy for facilitating the shift to a knowledge-driven organization with a strong learning culture is summarized in the diagram below:

Note: The development of the strategy drew from the framework used by Accenture Development in its proposal for a knowledge sharing strategy for the VS&L program.

The components of the strategy as reflected in the above diagram are relatively self-evident. As such, they represent the most fundamental efforts the Program Quality Unit team will need to undertake to succeed at making the shift to a knowledge-driven organization. This it could do not if any one of these components is not advancing.

A few explanations, however, are in order. “Making the benefits case” is about being able to articulate to senior management and all levels of the organization what the benefits are to CARE and to staff in creating a Program Quality Unit with the designated vision and responsibilities. In all that we do, we must be able to argue cogently the rationale for improving the learning environment, promoting forms of reflective practice, encouraging more equitable relations amongst staff, etc. To expect staff to agree to the changes and become the driving force, time must be invested continuously to helping them to understand why we are doing what we are doing. Making the link to the LRSP is a strong starting point for making the case.

Measuring the achievements of the Unit as well as progress against the Strategic Direction is a way for the Unit to hold itself accountable and demonstrate to all staff the value of the changes. In terms of governance, the endorsement by the leadership and consistent messaging from the top to convey the importance of this work will go far in building trust of the staff in the efforts we undertake with them.

Focus Areas for PQ Unit

and Their Attributes

We established a set of focus areas that are closely inter-related, inter-dependent, and mutually reinforcing. These constitute the content areas of our work in the years to come and will be the basis for our milestones and measurement system. They also form the basis for conceptualizing the roles and positions to be held by the Program Quality Unit. It should be noted, however, that the ‘attributes’ do not suggest that the PQ Unit will bear primary responsibility for all of these but the Unit will catalyze the change processes to be led by various actors and Units within CARE BD as well as capitalize on the existing initiatives or seeds of change.

See next page for diagram of the four focus areas with their attributes. These focus areas are further elaborated in the section following this on corresponding actions / initiatives to be undertaken, a brief explanation of each action, and the expected collaboration with other Units or actors within CARE.

Program Quality Unit

Focus Areas and Their Attributes

CARE Bangladesh Program Quality Unit1

1. Monitoring progress against the strategic direction on a learning culture

The Unit will develop a measurement system to monitor progress in creating a learning culture, as described in the Strategic Direction. This progress is contributed by not only the PQ Unit but all other actors in CARE. This measurement system will be based on agreed upon benchmarks for year 1 and each year thereafter for five years.

Description of actions or initiatives to be taken towards this:

No. / Action or Initiative / Explanation / Collaboration &
Roles of Others
1.1 / Develop a Unit workplan / This workplan will reflect all initiatives of the Unit itself and will be done at the six-month mark initially, then annually. It will relate to the overall plan for achieving a learning culture. The Unit will use a team TOP approach. / The workplan will have to be done with input from others in CBHQ in order that there be agreement and clarity on who has primary responsibility for what in achieving this SD. The plan should also be vetted with EMT and PMCT at a minimum.
1.2 / Develop a monitoring plan for the Unit / Progress against the workplan should be monitored, not only in terms of completion, but quality and effectiveness. / Feedback from others on evaluating the progress. Yearly evaluations could also be done by an external consultant.
1.3 / Set benchmarks for six months, annually, and 5 years to achieve the SD 3 / The benchmarks represent the types and levels of change that are expected at each of these points in time.
These may have considerable overlap with the program quality indicators that CARE-BD will pilot as a CARE USA initiative. / This will need agreement and buy-in from sr mgt and other levels of CARE, as everyone is responsible for promoting learning and program quality.
1.4 / Develop a monitoring plan for the benchmarks. / The plan will identify methods for measurement, who, by when, and the product to be shared. The evaluation could also be done by an external organization – worth discussing. / Will also be vetted and shared.

2. Improving internal communication, learning and sharing

There is a broad scope to cover under this focal area. For example, you would want to see all forms of learning being promoted – individual, team and organizational – both informal (as well as spontaneous) and formal (or structured). You would also want to see various multiple forms of internal networking, as well as opportunities for exchange and cross-fertilization across programs, laterally, from field upwards, etc. Improving internal communication, learning and sharing could be recognized in the ten attributes repeated here below:

  1. Clear and explicit individual, team and organizational learning going on at all times
  2. Reflective processes in all programs (routinized)
  3. At organizational level, internally networked in diverse ways
  4. Staff are able to acquire information efficiently or, in other cases, the demand for information between programs and Units is on the rise
  5. The PQ Unit routinely coordinates with all parts of the organization
  6. Team-based work becomes routine
  7. Staff feel at home anywhere in the organization
  8. Various units or departments have new procedures and clear roles and responsibilities to promote learning and “knowledge-for-impact”
  9. Some structural changes to align the organization towards the SD
  10. Staff relations are less hierarchical, more equitable, more prone to learning from each other (esp. supervisor-supervisee)

The approach to achieving these improvements that the Program Quality Unit will take divides into four major areas of action below (2.1 – 2.4) with a brief description under each section.

2.1 / Shifting ways of working, interacting, and behaving

This group of actions is aimed at shifting ways of working and interacting with one another as well as changing behaviors in CARE that are necessary for enabling the growth of a learning environment. Overcoming barriers in communication and in our abilities and inclinations to share, seek, and access information is crucial to this process. The learning and knowledge sharing that will result from better flow of information pertains to individuals, teams, Units, projects – all are beneficiaries of this process. The invisible barriers to information flow that are sometimes present in subordinate-supervisor relations, field-office, project-project, or Unit to Unit we also seek to overcome through the proposed set of activities. But it is also about the quality of information that is generated and transmitted. Forms of reflective practice, for instance, will help project teams to produce more meaningful information through richer discussions that invite a multiplicity of views on issues generated by the field. We also learn to be more analytical when given the opportunity to reflect on our work collectively. Many of the processes for knowledge sharing proposed here will improve our ‘shared understanding’ of the work CARE does, enable us to articulate, with the evidence at hand (which is far more than simply hard data), our impacts as well as the knowledge gained as a development organization, and enable us to have an effect on other external actors, policies, and development practice.

No. / Action or Initiative / Explanation / Collaboration &
Roles of Others
2.1.1 / Incorporate reflective practice in all projects / Reflective practice suggests a change in how you think about, approach, and feel responsible for your work. And it links that behavior to a process or practice that is intended to encourage staff to be in an inquiry mode while you do your routine tasks. It may also suggest new opportunities for staff to collectively reflect on their work. Forms of reflective practice typically involve an action learning cycle, almost by definition. All reflection innovations, such as the HIV/AIDS Unit, should be set up with a measurement system to track change. / HIV/AIDS Unit to offer its lessons learned;
All projects
2.1.2 / Create ‘informal learning spaces’ in work environment / Various means for enabling staff to build rapport, make new contacts, discover new things, exchange ideas through informal learning (e.g., the brown bag lunches) in each office environment, starting with CBHQ / Informal Learning Spaces Taskforce; point persons at regional level?
2.1.3 / Link positive team initiatives with one another for cross-learning and modelling / This pertains to the TOP (team operating plan) introduced to specific teams in CARE under ILCA. Efforts to bring the different team approaches together could lead to a set of principles and practices. / HR and participating teams; SDU; HIV/AIDS
2.1.4 / Develop guidance for CARE’s ‘meeting’ culture and use FOMT, SMT, and ROMT as initial vehicles / Reviewing with staff how we conduct regularly scheduled meetings and assessing ‘accepted practice’ with a view to making changes in how we conduct and participate in these meetings – to create greater voice, enrich the exchange, enable reflection, adapt to different learning styles, facilitate better / All groups which have regular meetings;
SDU for testing and ideas
2.1.5 / Upgrade and improve orientation process for new staff, particularly on programming / This is about improving the presentation or manner in which the information about each Unit is delivered; and about thinking through an effective means for orienting staff in CARE-BD’s core set of principles, practices, etc. that are essential for ensuring consistency in CARE / Whoever organizes the orientation workshops
2.1.6 / Brainstorm on option of a ‘learning champion network’ / There is some demand to have point persons in the region who will champion learning and be the communication vehicle for the PQ Unit. But we should look at pros and cons to doing this and weigh it against other options (e.g., the ‘internal networkers’) / Can get a small group together on this
2.1.7 / Provide guidance to SII core group on women’s empowerment on the internal knowledge sharing mechanism / This really needs to focus on the learning processes for connecting the wisdom from the SII to the needs of the projects in improving their understanding and approach to women’s emp as well as gender equity. Focus needs to be on learning and not on dissemination. / SII core group
2.2 / Building institutional routines for incorporating responsibility for program quality and learning in other Units and positions

This set does not include actions for subsequent fiscal years, as these are more difficult to spell out at this point and will require concerted consultation with the respective units in CARE. This objective – to build institutional routines for incorporating responsibility for program quality and learning in other units and positions – is specifically here to ensure that the importance and accountability for program quality are neither restricted to nor perceived as being the sole responsibility of the Program Quality Unit. Before the end of FY08, the Program Quality Unit would expect to have an understanding with each unit / position on its role in promoting program quality and learning. These discussions may result in agreed adjustments in unit responsibilities and workplans and perhaps even evolve into some structural realignment in CARE, should the need become evident.

No. / Action or Initiative / Explanation / Collaboration &
Roles of Others
2.2.1 / Clarify and strengthen the role of SDU in its support for program quality / The SDU has invaluable experience relating to program approaches, empowerment process, action learning, teamwork, staff skills that have already set the precedent for some of the things we will want to promote more widely in CARE. Let’s find ways we can tap this goldmine and then begin to institutionalize their role. / SDU; Humaira; perhaps a couple other senior staff?