relevant decisions.
A robust management system defines the core areas for engagement of the management team and the cadence and process by which management will address different areas and make different
decisions. A robust system defines the decisions to be made both within the year, and across multi-year strategy and planning cycles. A defined cadence for reviews and planning processes ensures that decisions are made in a timely manner and addresses interdependencies, enabling continuous
improvement.
Our first recommendation is that OCHA link decisions regarding strategy, finance and budget, people and talent, key initiatives, and operations into a cohesive management system that drives the EMC/management agenda and allows for the appropriate checks and balances. This will require improving some aspects of OCHA's strategy, finance and budget, people and talent management, key initiatives, and operations. We address the key recommended changes to each of these in turn.
Strategy. This is a set of organization-level strategic decisions that ultimately set or change the direction of work for the organization and its component parts. A best practice sequence includes an annual strategic planning cycle. The annual process forecasts changes in external and internal conditions influencing a change in organizational approach. Following the development of the entity strategic plan, the annual planning process takes place to allow organizational units to develop their work plans for the coming year. In many organizations, senior leaders will present these plans for leadership debate and discussion and for USG-equivalent guidance.
OCHA creates a Strategic Plan and a Management Plan every 4 years. The Strategic Results Framework and Management Results Frameworks are revised every 2 years, and work plans are developed by each branch annually. To ensure that OCHA's strategy drives all decisions made throughout the organization, OCHA should (a) review the timing of its strategic cycle, and (b) ensure that its strategy has clear and actionable metrics that cascade to all branches of the organization.
OCHA should shorten the timing of the strategic cycle to be on an annual basis to ensure that topics for collective engagement are discussed on a regular cadence. The organization can manage how deep each of these reviews is, and may elect to only do a deep review on its current four year cycle. However, questions around OCHA's role in cash programming should be able to be addressed in a prompt manner and the current four-year cadence runs the risk that many substantive issues need managed on an ad hoc basis versus through the strategy process.
OCHA should create strategic plans with clear metrics. At the moment, OCHA's strategic plan lists objectives without identifying how to measure them. As a specific example, one of the strategic
objectives in the 2014-2017 Strategic Plan is "Humanitarian decision-making is based on a common
45 situational awareness." In order for this to be actionable, it should be unpacked into a set of metrics that would indicate whether there was a common situational awareness and whether decision-making was sufficiently based on that awareness. The strategic plan does define specific outcomes, but they are not tied to metrics. For example, one of the outcomes that follows is "Ensure access to high-quality and timely data and information." In order for this to be actionable, this should be further unpacked into a set of metrics that indicates the quality of the data, and improved access to data can be further unpacked into sufficient access to data, and the timeliness of the access.
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Linked metrics
Decisions based on common
situation data Improved data quality
Decisions tied to data
Improved situational awareness
Improved data access
More people access data Timeliness of data
In this example, the objective is accompanied by measurable indicators of progress or success:
timeliness of data can be tracked through metrics such as number of days to publish a situation report, and access to data can be tracked through number of people accessing website, or number of
responders receiving report in field office. The strategic plan does not specify any particular metrics at this level, and therefore it is difficult in the current state to measure whether the objectives in the plan have been achieved.
Strategic plans should be written so that they neatly cascade to branch activities and metrics. At OCHA, individual work plans for branches and sections specify more tangible actions tied to the objectives, but are not always linked to metrics. For example, under the example objective and
outcomes described above, CRD has listed a series of outputs and deliverables that are tied to "when"
and "where". However, there is no quantifiable or measurable metric. Consequently, it is difficult to track whether those activities led to an improved outcome based on the strategic objective. Other actions in the CRD plan are more measurable – for example, work with IM working group to strengthen existing IPOR process and help improve quality scores. This is an example of a metric that can be measured to track whether strides have been made towards meeting the strategic objective (assuming quality scores are a good indicator). It is not our recommendation to merely have more metrics, but instead to have measurable metrics within the work plans that link to the overall strategic plan. This would enforce greater alignment to the OCHA Strategic Plan.
Finance and Budget. This is a set of decisions directly corresponding to the strategic plan, which indicate the expected and actual financial resources required or available to pursue organizational goals. Generally, the budgeting process and development of annual cost plans use unit-level work plans as a foundation on which to build out projected expenses and revenue targets. Consequently,
46 business units may be required to adjust their work plans depending on the outcome of the entity
budget process.
OCHA has an annual budget process whereby the annual cost plans are reviewed and approved for the following years. However, the budget process is not linked to the strategic planning process, in part due to the longer planning cycle of the strategic plan. A clear link must be made between strategic objectives and the financial resources allocated to those objectives. An interconnected budget would clearly tie a strategic objective to invest in a particular area to the strategic objective metrics, the outcome of the investment, and a corresponding increase in financial resources dedicated to the programmatic areas supporting the objective (the total investment required to meet the objective), which would then allow for tracking and measuring impact of that strategic decision.
People and Talent. This is a set of decisions related to the capabilities, or human resources, required to achieve the organization's strategy. In best practice examples, an annual talent planning process follows budget approval for the coming year. This allows the organization to develop its strategy for recruiting to fill vacancies, succession planning, and other critical people and talent issues with a clear view of resource allocation across the organization. Best practice examples also include quarterly people and talent reviews to address staffing and other relevant topics such as progress with learning and development initiatives, and ongoing tracking of staff engagement and satisfaction. Best practice also dictates that while the bulk of the work of this process will happen within each division, the process has checks and balances from outside of the division to ensure people feel it is as data-driven and unbiased as possible.
Currently, OCHA has no annual process of reviewing people and talent and ensuring that human resources are clearly tied to the strategic plan. This topic is extensively covered in the People and Staffing chapter of this report. UN regulations pose some challenges to people and talent decisions;
nevertheless we recommend that OCHA develops a people and talent review cycle to ensure that people strategy remains a priority throughout the year. This would need to be configured carefully to ensure that decision rights regarding people are well articulated and kept sufficiently close to the managers with the greatest visibility into performance, while ensuring effective linkages to overall organizational needs. The link to the strategic plan should be clearly tracked and measured to ensure that people decisions support organizational strategic objectives.
Initiatives. This set of decisions focuses on initiatives related to the functions of the organization, tied to the underlying strategic goals of the organization. Initiative planning generally occurs in two phases. In the first phase, plans are created at the beginning of the year, linking branch activity to the organization's strategic objectives. There is also a mid-year review ahead of the strategic review that assesses progress across all areas, including strategic, operational, financial, key initiative, as well as people and talent area. The results of this mid-year review would allow for adjustments in initiative focus the second half of the year to close gaps, mitigate risks and adapt to changing conditions, and would ultimately feed into the creation of the annual strategic plan.
We recommend that OCHA introduce a regular cadence for reviewing programmatic initiatives.
Currently, OCHA has no regular cadence for discussing major organizational initiatives, and those initiatives are discussed on an ad hoc basis. Not every initiative can be forecasted but there will be a need to introduce new initiatives to a standing agenda and a need to ensure that major initiatives for the organization (e.g. WHS, IASC-related initiatives) are tracked and measured. A clear link to the
strategic plan is also required, and new programmatic initiatives should be evaluated relative to the strategic plan and objectives of the organization to ensure that the initiative should be pursued.
Recognizing the reality of emergency response, flexibility should be built into the deadlines for the achievement of OCHA milestones for major initiatives, but establishing and regularly reviewing a specific set of measurable outcomes is critical in clarifying and socializing the agenda of the organization and getting better alignment behind priorities.
In the implementation phase of the functional review, we recommend that OCHA create a clear baseline that links the strategic framework to the activities of the organization and key areas of focus for the next periods in a transparent way that allows straightforward assessment of whether tangible
47 outcomes have been achieved. This will involve assessing how to create an interlinked cascade
vertically through the organization, ensuring both that the detail required to execute against outcomes is maintained at the right levels of the organization, and that it is simple to assess the top level outcome by tracing its roots deeper in the organization. It is equally important to determine whether routine or function-specific performance measures fit within this approach. As the foundation for a new
management system, it will be important to ensure that the reporting system is sufficiently simple to keep a focus on proposed activities and outcomes without overweighting the organization with bureaucracy.
Operations. This is a set of decisions related to the alignment of resources with the needs of the OCHA organization on a continuous basis throughout the year. A best practice system for operations management involves monthly operational reviews, which can be structured to include priority topics on the standing agenda. Such topics generally involve updates on resourcing and initiative changes.
OCHA does not have a regular cadence of discussing the former day-to-day management topics, and OCHA no longer has a mid-year review. OCHA does however have regular and ad hoc methods of discussing updates and critical decisions for major emergencies, and particularly L3 emergencies.
We recommend ensuring that the operations topics regarding the day-to-day management of OCHA are adequately and regularly discussed at the appropriate levels, even if just for information sharing. Specifically, OCHA should share major updates related to OCHA's internal activities that enable the organization to operate across all its divisions, branches and offices worldwide. We recommend a monthly operating review with a set agenda that cycles through topics across all OCHA functions, including updates from major emergency responses.
To illustrate, one topic that has arisen in our interviews is how long offices stay open and whether there could be an opportunity to exit more quickly at times. We did not include the specifics of
addressing this question in the functional review but the question itself suggests this might be a topic that should have a regular review cadence that people could point to as the governance mechanism for this decision. We suspect that there are other similar questions that would benefit from the same mechanism.
OCHA could consider bringing back the mid-cycle review if deeper 6-monthly reviews combined with lighter monthly reviews seem more feasible. There is a critical link between operations updates and the measurable strategic objectives. Regular check-ins allow for effective tracking and adjustment over the year, re-allocation of resources as needed, and a clear view as to what adjustments are required for the subsequent strategic review.
In addition, the reviews can rotate among other topics on a quarterly basis, such as progress on key strategic and management indicators across OCHA. This is a key area where management of the organization closely interacts with what the business does, and is an active way to ensure that the decisions made in the prior year align with the needs of the business units. The balance between information sharing versus decision-making in these reviews will be determined through the decision rights framework. Even if updates are simply information sharing, together with the programmatic review cycle, this recommendation would keep the organization abreast of changes within different divisions.
Taken together, this set of recommendations would strengthen the fundamental components of OCHA's management model and make the activities and resourcing of the organization closely linked to its overall strategy. They would also make progress against strategic goals easy to measure and communicate. A holistic view of the proposed management model can be found below.
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Management system
Dec Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Strategy
Output from core planning process Review process Strategic Results
Quarterly reviews to assess needs, surge capacity and deployments, plan for recruitment and filling gaps
C
Operations
M1 M2 M3 M4 M5 M6 M7 M8 M9 M10 M11 M12
Monthly operations reviews reporting progress against plan & forecast, with action plan to close gaps
E Propose each review includes reporting on L3 crises,
with rotation across core functions ensuring each is addressed at least once per quarter