A Paradox of scaling up at the United Nations: Doing More with More
Part 1: Transformation of the Project Cycle
At my agency of the United Nations, our current situation might be categorized as an embarrassment of riches. Donor funding for new projects (“resource mobilization”) has been off the charts. We now have to do more with more. Compared to doing more with less, this sounds easy.
But here is the paradox: Scaling up requires transformation, not just evolution. And the transformation process is shaking our foundations and calling into question our core mission.
As an international development practitioner with 20 years of field experience, now working at Headquarters, here’s what I’ve learned about scaling up at the UN.
A diverse portfolio is pulling us in fundamentally different directions
To describe the background in numbers, here is the current make-up of active projects:
Notice that nearly two-thirds of projects — 1700 out of almost 2700 — remain small. They are so small in fact that their aggregate budget size represents only 7 percent of the total USD 7.5 billion portfolio of projects that we implement around the world.
Conversely, 5 percent of our projects are large projects (even USD 100 M+ mega projects) — and these are so big that their tiny share dominates over half of the agency’s total budget for project implementation.
This is a portfolio pulling in different directions.
By the numbers, our project management time is dominated by small projects. By the size of the resources, our portfolio warrants most attention on the larger projects.
Currently we have just one Project Cycle. It was originally designed for small projects because that’s all we used to do — mainly providing specialized technical assistance for government ministries. Now a few more steps have been added for quality assurance of large projects and some simplifications for small projects.
What we really need is a transformation in how we manage projects, both for the sake the large projects as well as for the small ones.
Transformation 1: No more one size fits all
Large projects need their own Project Cycle.
Right now it feels like the Project Cycle is being stretched beyond its limits to manage the changes in our portfolio. Scaling up means first developing a different Project Cycle that is more appropriate to large and mega projects — these projects need more complex planning and oversight than individual smaller ones.
Since large project interventions aim at multi-disciplinary and systems-level change, a crucial updating of the agency’s approach to technical support arrangements has already been approved. The improvement moves away from a one-to-one technical oversight model of one lead technical officer for one project.
Modular technical teaming models are now on the table. They can be adjusted according to the size and complexity of projects.
Large projects demand more rigorous practices for monitoring and evaluation, accountability to affected populations, and environmental and social safeguards. Fortunately, examples of how to do this well are abundant — both in individual projects within our organization, as well as in sister UN agencies and international development banks.
Capitalizing on these experiences will develop our institutional playbook for large scale and complex project interventions. It is imperative to fill the gap in Project Cycle rules and tools for managing large projects.
And we need to stop pinning that burden (and risk!) on the initiative of individual colleagues in the field.
Transformation 2: Deciding which small projects still make the cut
We are drowning in large numbers of individual small projects.
Even with an existing Project Cycle that was designed for small projects, the skyrocketing numbers (1700 and rising) have stalled our administrative and managerial processes almost to a halt. These bottlenecks not only impact our ability to deliver the small projects, but they also delay big projects implementation.
Why do we continue taking on small projects, constituting only 7% of our budget, if they negatively affect our capability to handle the remaining 93%?
A number of people within my organization, particularly Headquarters, would say we shouldn’t.
But that 7% represents half a billion dollars. Weighed against the human faces of hunger and malnutrition, desperate poverty, conflict, natural disaster and other climate impacts, this is no small amount of resources to turn away.
Small projects have many potential benefits:
- Small interventions can still make a difference in targeting pockets of need even in lower middle and middle income countries — those who have graduated from receiving most donor attention.
- Small projects can be catalytic, aimed at policy and institutional changes or at leveraging much larger finance flows. They can yield outsize benefits versus their dollar value.
- Even when they don’t add up to larger impacts, small projects can chip away at the big problems by breaking them down to manageable sizes. Facing existential-sized global challenges, the small milestones of achievement give us heart to keep going.
The small projects still matter. Nonetheless, we can’t continue the same way, because the costs of taking on small projects are still very real.
We need a transformation in the way we manage small projects.
Transformation 3: A Program Cycle for efficiency+
Small projects demand a way to manage them at a portfolio level — in essence, a Program Cycle.
My organization has already been through successive rounds of streamlining the Project Cycle. This has reduced managerial and administrative costs of small projects (including their opportunity costs).
It isn’t enough.
No matter how streamlined, managing 1700 projects individually will continue to overwhelm us. Another way is to cluster our small projects into portfolios or programs.
We are in the process of drafting our agency’s first-ever Program Cycle approach to project management. The basic idea is simple: The rules and tools will be built around programs as “containers” of contributions. Our quality assurance (and time) will be focused at the program level. Small contributions can be nested, planned and managed in an integrated way.
The primary objective of the Program Cycle approach is to provide scale efficiencies from clustering projects together for technical and managerial development and oversight.
But we can’t lose sight of why we still do small projects. Therefore within the the Program Cycle, we must value the potential inherent in small projects for addressing geographic disparities in aid, creating catalytic impacts, and delivering manageable-size milestones along the longer path toward change.
These values represent the “plus” in efficiency+.
Programs made up of small projects are not just a substitute for large projects. The goal should reach beyond achieving scale efficiencies.
As we scale up, the very reasons that we still make commitments to small projects need to become a systematized feature of their design and management.
The next steps…
The right direction is to implement these changes as a modular set of options — to match to the right model to the right project(s), with flexibility to continue adapting to future changes.
My focus here is on the Project Cycle transformations needed in our approach and processes to project management.
To fully scale up, additional critical elements will revolve around dimensions of organizational capacities, partnerships, and digital enablement, to name a few.
Stay tuned for more thoughts on this. I have many to share!
This posting is my own and does not necessarily represent my organization’s views, positions, strategies or opinions.
