You finally did it. The Department Secretary and some senior officials are sold on your project. They said yes to adapting it in the offices inside their government department. You’re on cloud nine!
Now you’ve gone on initial meetings with a few middle managers who are critical to project implementation and you could observe that they are sizing you up and showing initial behaviors of trust. What will you do to make sure the project gets implemented?
In the previous blog, we focused on the basics of human interaction: understanding ourselves and our peers’ behaviors for better group dynamics, and building sensitivity to diagnose and address potential pain points early.
Now the situation is about what you’re actually going to do to get sh*t done. This will be the second blog in a three-part series and this time we’ll cover context assessment and the tools you typically need in this critical step.
Assess context
How ready is this organization to adapt this project? How ready are the leaders at the top, middle, and bottom to this change?
Ask any project manager worth her salt and the reaction is the same: starting something new is always hard. A lot of things can complicate new projects: institutional inertia, long-term fatigue of staff of day-to-day work, high staff turnover, mismatched interests, internal politics… it can be anything really.
Assessing context means choosing to understand a new environment prior to attempting to alter or influence a part of it. Deliberately making time to immerse yourself in this new system shows a few values:
- you are humble enough to say your idea may be wrong due to the assumptions you had when you made it (i.e. an idea that flourished outside the confines of government bureaucracy);
- you are willing to risk looking like a fool because you’re about to test your project’s assumptions within a government institution;
- you are open enough to work with government despite the challenges it will bring (e.g. difference in mindset, culture, ‘how things are done’, leadership and management style, etc.)
What do you usually have to understand and be aware of when you’re about to work with government teams?
1. Mandate of the department or agency
Download a copy of their budget for the year. Read up on their priority projects/programs/activities, key performance indicators, organizational outputs, etc. If they’re fully transparent, they may also have announcements on public events slated for the next few months. This is important to note in case you have plans to announce something or get to engage the network usually connected with this department/agency for potential collaborations.
2. Organizational structure and list of key officials
Check your contacts in the sector that the government department/agency belongs to. Some of them would have worked or had meetings with some of these officials. Obtaining more knowledge on their way of thinking, what influences them, and what motivates them may be helpful as you create your strategies and activities. If you get lucky, you can cross-reference these anecdotes with the official’s digital footprint to get a glimpse of their persona. If you are pretty fortunate, the anecdotes from your key sources (and by that I mean people who truly know these government officials) can give you a sense of the levels of power that exist.
John Gaventa’s work is a reminder that any space — be it in government, non-profit, or multinational company — is never neutral. Assessing and understanding power relations is critical and cannot be underestimated in the implementation of your project. To directly quote from his work:
“Power relations help to shape the boundaries of participatory spaces, what is possible within them, and who may enter, with which identities, discourses and interests…we might understand power ‘as the network of social boundaries that delimit fields of possible action.’ Freedom, on the other hand, ‘is the capacity to participate effectively in shaping the social limits that define what is possible’ (Hayward 1998:2)”
Pro tip: Read Gaventa’s work. And because spaces are always dynamic, don’t stop assessing power relations. It is not a one-off activity in your work plan, logframe, or Gantt chart. Make sure to equip your team with this knowledge because regularly ‘tapping the organizational frequency’ is a must when it comes to working in and with government. Adaptability and agility are key skills when it comes to governance.
3. Policy and legal environment
Government officials and civil servants are very much aware of the laws and policies that provide the (legal) basis for their existence. I’ve worked with various levels of government and this was by far, the oft-repeated line I heard: “We were created by Republic Act [insert number] to [insert mandate]”. Their identity and the scope and limits of what they do is firmly rooted and framed by the legalese. You can view it as horse blinders or There is a strength and a weakness to this but that is for another blog. But what does this mean for you? Please please please do your research well and carve out the time to understand the policy and legal environment. Scour their website for policies that are directly or indirectly related to your initiative. This will show you what they are working on, what they have been doing in the past, what they value, and where your initiative is located in the greater scheme of things.
4. Map your assets: start with the stakeholders
Before you get terribly engrossed with your project vision, ground yourself first in reality. Human beings typically jump into creating solutions from a “What’s missing here that can disrupt and make things better?” when the mode can be “What solutions or approaches have been deployed? By whom and with what resources?”
Assessing context means understanding the assets in the environment: bird in hand first. It helps to know who the stakeholders are in the government department, office, or unit and their possible interrelations across the organization and outside it. Part of the tools you can try and likely adapt include the Stakeholder Analysis, People & Connections Map and Target Group.
What skill do you need to unlearn-learn-relearn?
How to ask questions. The power of inquiry is necessary for anyone who seeks to work with government and with all kinds of teams in any sector. It’s hard to unlearn the default of framing yes-or-no questions (e.g. Is your boss a great manager? Are my teeth white?) If you want to learn context in a dynamic manner, the questions you will ask will need to be What-How-Why that will call for answers that will reveal all sorts of stories (e.g. What are the key priorities of the official? Why is it important to him/her? What are the benefits to the department?)
Why do we start with context assessment with various aspects to understand?
Institutions such as government departments are built by complex systems and understanding it requires systems thinking: emphasis is on interconnections, looks at wholes rather than parts, shows that no one person or sector is responsible for the output/s, and that solving systemic problems requires collaborative effort (more on this in the next blog!)
I’m going to run an open data program and/or data innovation project along with a government team. What do I do now?
If you happen to be doing context assessment for open data work, you can check out Benchmark on Readiness for Open Agency Data (BROAD) tool: a self-assessment tool to gauge open data readiness of a government department, agency, or office. We tested this in selected Philippine government departments and agencies. Do feel free to test it and adapt as as you see fit (power analysis isn’t included yet in the BROAD tool). Another option for an assessment tool is using the Open Data Maturity Model of the Open Data Institute (ODI).
UNDP also published the Guide to Data Innovation for Development and included an annex of tools for context assessment such as Problem Definition, Data Gaps, Stakeholder Mapping, and Data Journey.
So what’s next after context assessment?
Wait for the next blog to find out :) Drop me a line over Twitter if you have comments, questions, or want to discuss some of these points!
