Recommendations to CIDA partner organizations

5.2.1.1. RBM could be an effective management and evaluation tool as well as a management strategy. As one of the respondents put it: "RBM has short-term advantages and long-term advantages, so what is ideal for a development organization is to use both simultaneously." The most basic application of RBM is to use the logic model to plan project activities and then the PMF to monitor the project's progress against set targets with the help of measurable indicators. Many organizations stressed the primordial importance of the logic model and, most importantly, the PMF in its project implementation and monitoring. But according to the interviewees, there is much more to RBM than just its tools. As the research findings show, RBM can assist in finding organizational strengths and weaknesses and allows for timely adjustments in strategies based on an analysis of the programlproject performance up-to-date.

Therefore, RBM methodology can also be used at a strategic organizational level to define the organization's vision and its global strategy.

5.2.1.2 As a strategy, RBM has to be applied consistently and regularly in order to be of benefit to organizations. As one of the interviewees put it, the logic model, the PMF, the risk

register and the resuits-based budget are oniy documents. They alone cannot guarantee the success of the project, but they may assist in it. Nevertheless, it is flot enough to prepare a logic model and a PMF as a part of a proposai and neYer use it agaifl. In order to be of value to its staff and the organization as a whole, the RBM approach and its tools have to be used on a regular basis in assessing the project's progress towards resuits. The RBM toois have to be constantly referred to as part of planning and monitoring and to be updated if there is any important change occurring in the proj ect' s context.

5.2.1.3 Organizations should have their global organizational definition of RBM. Most of the organizations that participated in this study use RBM in an uneven way, meaning that some Country Offices use it while some other don't. Moreover, the concept of RBM is flot yet consensual within organizalions and stiil leaves open doors for interpretations. Even managers of the same organization tend to interpret RBM in différent ways. Lack of consensus as to the meaning of RBM within Canadian organizations can have inadvertent effects on their local partners. As we discussed in the Research Findings section, Canadian NGOs implement their projects with the help of local partner organizations. As project performance depends greatly on their local partner organizalions' management capacities, Canadian NGOs encourage their local partners to use RBM approach to plan, implement and report on their activities. Consequently, these local organizations become real end-users of RBM methodology. It is therefore a great responsibility for the Canadian NGOs to transmit a coherent concept of RBM to their partners. In order for that to happen, Canadian organizations' staff would have to share the common understanding of RBM and the role it plays in management of their projects. Aside from benefiting their partner organizations, it would also allow Canadian organizations staff to "speak the same language" when it cornes to the daily project management work.

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5.2.1.4 A shift to RBM in organizations requires a corporate culture change. If an organization takes a strategic decision to use RBM beyond its application as a tool and adopt it as its management strategy, it can bring about a positive organizational change that focuses ail organizational efforts on achievement of planned resuits, promotes evidence-based decision-making and effective use of project resources and that brings doser staff and involves project beneficiaries and local partner organizations. This change implies a shift of paradigm from an NGO that simply uses resources from its donor to a more business-oriented vision, which means using resources in an efficient way to achieve results. It is a slow evolutionary process that requires organization-wide adjustments and investments.

5.2.1.5 Organizations' top management has an important role to play in the shift to resuits-focused culture. In the organization that went through the organizational reshuffling to adjust its strategies and processes to the new results-based management paradigm senior managers played a very important role as leaders of change. Surely, the shift to the results-oriented culture may originate in one of the Regional or Country Offices but it is a top-down process to tweak all the organizational structure starting with modifying the global strategy, creating new planning, monitoring and evaluation tools and processes, and finishing with training staff in both HQ and field offices. In order for the organizational change to be successful, the results-oriented way of managing projects requires a full backing of the top managers in the organizations' HQ.

5.2.1.6 Organizations should invest more to train their staff on RBM. The major organizational weakness related to the RBM that was mentioned by the interviewees is the relatively low capacity of their staff with regards to the knowiedge of RBM. The understanding

of RBM in field Offices is still relatively weak, especially among staff implementing project activities in the field. The managers who were interviewed in this research talked about the low level of understanding and knowledge of RBM methodology among their field staff and staff working with local partner organizations. It is absolutely necessary that the organizations invest in an ongoing RBM training of their staff, so that they know how to use RBM approach when planning, implementing and monitoring of their projects and also how to use it with their partner organizations. What is needed most is the specific knowledge of how to convey in a simple and understandable way the concepts of RBM to local partner organizations whose members are illiterate or have only basic education, and how to tweak the RBM tools to adapt them to their specific needs.

5.2.1.7 Organizations should report on key indicators giobaily. Canadian NGOs report on their projects not only to their donor(s) but also to the Canadian public. Most of those reports to the public are done at activity or output level, for example giving information on number of hospitals/schools built, number of chiidren that went to school etc. The information on outputs is relative as the public has no way of knowing whether 20 schools built for a particular amount of money is a lot or not, because of lack of comparison. Nevertheless, with intention of demonstrating to the public the actual change that was achieved due to their work, some organizations made a step ahead and now report at a resuits level. The information on resuits shows the actual change in Lives of project beneficiaries that was made due to the organization's work. Immediate outcomes are the ones that can be directly attributed to the outputs of an organization and its initiatives. Choosing a set of indicators at the immediate resuits level for each sector of intervention, that ail Country Offices have to report against independently of what

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indicators are required by the donors, will allow the organizations to report on resuits achieved by the organization giobaily.

5.2.1.8 Organizations should monitor the implementation of RBM and use this knowledge in organizational learning at a global level. The organization giobaily could benefit from the experience of their staff in implementing results-based projects. This could be achieved by encouraging their staff that worked on results-based projects to share their insights into that management approach. Also, the Country Offices could share any tools, guidelines they created that may be useful to other programs. Does the Office have RBM expertise, know-how that may be adopted by the organization as a whoie? What good practice does the Office have to share?

What mistakes were made that couid be avoided?