THE QUESTIONNAIRE IS BROWN with dirt and here and there are splash marks that might have been caused by droplets of sweat falling from the farmer's brow to stain the page. In neat, laboriously penciled script, she—in Africa women farmers produce the bulk of crops for household consumption—has written, “the project has failed us because we have not learnt new ways to market our cassava crop. Also, we need access to credit for farm machinery, which we did not get.”
This unnamed woman, sitting perhaps in the shade of an acacia tree somewhere in the Kenyan uplands on a blazing June day in 1997, is the end-user of a multimillion-dollar, multi-year project aimed at improving agricultural yields among women farmers, and thus household income and nutrition, in five African countries.
To be fair, this project has had some considerable successes: new, blight-resistant strains of crops have been introduced; yields have increased, allowing the farmers to earn income by selling surplus crops and seeds; new farm technologies that conserve natural resources have been adopted. But like most projects aimed at improving quality of life in developing nations, this one was designed around the requirements of a granting agency, not around the actual requirements of the population it served. In project management terms, this would be like asking the bank to draw up the blueprints for a bridge, or the accounting department to create a requirements document for a software product. To paraphrase Samuel Johnson's famous quip, when such a project design process yields a success, it's like seeing a dog walking upright on two legs—it's not so much that it's well done, but that you are surprised to see it done at all.
The Language Barrier. Why this gulf between two disciplines—project management and community development—with so much to gain from each other?
Partly, it's an artifact of an educational system built in silos. Community development folks tend to come to their work from the social sciences, economics, or public health programs. Project managers, traditionally, have been in a building on another part of campus. Schooled to separate professional dialects, they can find it hard to communicate with each other. Write “end user” in a proposal and the community development expert will likely cross it out and write “beneficiary.” Critical Path? No, LogFrame.
Supply-driven projects, such as introducing herbicides for weed control, have been common in community development. The new demand-driven, customer-focused project mindset now promoted by the World Bank will mean that development agencies must pay closer attention to the technical, social and environmental forces that will affect a project's sustainability after completion.
Photo: On-Farm Productivity Enhancement Project
Then, too, in the heady atmosphere of big government grants that once reigned supreme, there was little emphasis on the marketplace mantra of getting it done right the first time, on time, on budget. A culture developed of sinking money into three- or five-year projects that looked good on paper and then sending someone out to evaluate whether or not the project had succeeded when the money was gone and the dust had settled. This paradigm worked so well that, as Moses Thompson of Team Technologies remarks drily, “People in development agencies have gotten so used to not having any impact at all that they can't believe they might actually have an adverse impact [on a beneficiary's situation] …”
Community development agencies have only recently come to view the beneficiaries of social projects, such as these village women in Senegal (pictured here with a World Vision field worker), as customers.
Photo: D. Heinen
Thompson, who heads up one of the few consulting firms that specializes in merging project management with community development (Team Technologies participated in the reengineering of USAID and is now working with the World Bank to introduce project management methodologies), also notes that there was a time when development agencies were excited about project management. “In the early ’60s development agencies were very interested in project scheduling technologies,” he says. “They felt they ought to be able to introduce it and trained a lot of people. The problem was, at that time no automated tools like MS Project existed. Given the degree of uncertainty in the environment, by the time you got your critical path worked out, it changed the next day and there was no flexible way to update the schedule.”
Frustrated and disappointed that project management hadn't lived up to their expectations, development agencies turned away from standard tools that came to be summarized in the PMBOK Guide and tried to develop their own tools, Thompson explains, such as the logical framework approach. “Project management tools were interesting, but what was missing was clarity on something more profound: the causal structure. Not just the deliverables, but the impacts of the project … things like changes in behavior of beneficiaries. These are much more difficult to get at. The agencies were having difficulties with the scheduling tools so they said, ‘let's get the project designs right, then we can make use of basic project scheduling.’”
Now with 200-odd user-friendly project planning, scheduling and tracking tools on the market, Thompson notes that there has been a resurgence of interest. “MS Project has made some headway with the World Bank,” he notes. “Basically, Microsoft gave it to them to spark interest. No development agency is really using project management—but I think they would like to.”
But much more than technology has changed in the environment. When institutions like the World Bank start contracting for project management training, as they recently did with Thompson's company, you can bet that other, more powerful drivers for change are also on the scene.
Global Village? Global commerce requires global markets. But, if recent indicators can be believed, we are gearing up to sell products to people who will be unable to buy them. While it's true that incomes have increased somewhat in developing nations, the U.N. Development Program, in its 1997 Human Development Report, maintains that poverty cannot be measured in terms of income alone. “Poverty should be looked at as an accumulation of illiteracy, malnutrition, early deaths, poor health care, and poor access to water and urban services,” program director James Gustave Speth said.
The report goes on to say that although global expansion of trade and investment is proceeding at breakneck speed the benefits have mostly gone to the more dynamic and powerful countries in the North and South. Already, annual losses to developing countries from unequal access to trade, labor and finance have been estimated at 500 billion dollars—10 times what they receive in foreign aid. The least developed countries, with 10 percent of the world's people, have only 0.3 percent of world trade—half their share of two decades ago. In 1963, the poorest 20 percent of the world's population held 2.3 percent of world income. Today, their share is only 1.1 percent—and still falling.
Sounds bad, yet the report says that poverty can be erased in the next century if governments manage global trade better and narrow the differences between genders and social classes. Some of the strategies they recommend—investing in human capital (especially in women as farmers, artisans and small-business owners) through education and training programs, and stimulating exports by fostering small enterprises—are things that development agencies have had some success with in the last decade. But it doesn't take a rocket scientist to see that, to keep up, development agencies are going to have to do more with less, and do it faster and more effectively.
Project Management and Community Development: A Convergence. In a way, community development provides an acid-test environment for the efficacy of project management. The external environment of the projects is very complex; social realities like drought and civil war as well as subtle balances of cultural factors must be understood and appreciated. It's a necessity to involve the beneficiaries, because they will be responsible for sustaining the outcomes of the project over time. It's fundamental to improve the design of the deliverables in order to achieve sustainability, yet the relationship between deliverables and their impacts is often extremely difficult to understand. Resources are limited and the impacts can sometimes mean the difference between life and death. A social development project involves large numbers of stakeholders and the impacts are of great interest to many parties, Moses Thompson explains, and so project scheduling by necessity becomes a social process. This necessitates large-scale collaborative implementation of project technologies: a challenge for practitioners in both fields.
Thompson further points out that there's an interesting synchronicity between the way that project management and community development have grown as disciplines over the last 30 years. While project management has begun to focus more and more intensively on the integrative and human aspects, community development has learned to design projects from the bottom up, beginning with the beneficiary. Yet in both disciplines, these human-centered ideas have to be much talked about before they are consistently implemented. Information systems projects still falter because of poor teamwork, and development agencies still fund public health projects that talk about participation without being truly participatory.
“These trends have developed in tandem but independently of each other. In West Africa in the early ’70s I was trying to develop project management expertise in local groups and had to create project management training from the ground up. Nothing existed. We were working in isolation, combining aspects of management science, behavioral science, adult learning … the project management and community development spheres were light-years apart,” Thompson recalls. Yet, both have come to similar conclusions about the organizational development element of project management. Both now focus on customers, teams, and social context. “We perhaps have an even better sense of how important these aspects of project management are,” says Thompson. “We get to see it firsthand. Such little impact from the billions that have been spent… we've witnessed firsthand the lack of fruits of our labor. In some countries it is so complicated … that we don't get very much value for the investment dollar … one of the greatest difficulties is trying to understand and define with the customer just what is the impact.
“It's taken a long time,” he adds, “for the development agencies to see the beneficiary as a customer with a valid point of view about their project design. This thinking is relatively new. But … the agencies have made some headway in this area … and only now can they turn to scheduling technology. In project management it was the other way around: they found the tools worked fine, as far as that went… but when they wanted to do different types of projects, with more complexity, they had to expand outward into the human dimension.”
Thompson believes that community development can teach project management a thing or two, as well. In a presentation last year at a project management conference in Australia, he noted that project managers found “insights that are useful in the development point of view, such as the importance of clarifying the impact in order to sharpen the definition of deliverable, the introduction of participatory methods, and the impact of external factors.”
Reader Service Number 5020
Watering the New South Africa
Seven U.S. project managers visited South Africa in November 1997 as representatives of the project management profession under the American People Ambassador Program. One of the many examples of project management's uses in this rapidly developing nation was presented to them by Thuso Ramaema, the chief director of water services, and Tony Roberts, chief information officer for the water affairs department.
South Africa's water supply, once held in its entirety by the Dutch and then administered as a public resource beginning in 1903 under British rule, is facing a crisis. If the current allocation of water continues, the water supply will be depleted by 2030. In 1993, as South Africa was preparing for the election of an entirely new government, the biggest election promise that was held out was a new water supply: water for every person in the country. The initial target was to supply water by 2007 to the 21 million people without it. To date, the first million have received access to a water supply.
The strategy for managing the program is BOTT: Build, Operate, Train, Transfer. The country has been divided into 44 planning areas, necessitating projects that range from nationwide to local in scope. Concurrently, a major information systems project is under way to provide Water Affairs with the data they need to properly administer this critical resource.
Project management in Water Affairs began in the GIS area, as maps produced in each province were integrated to form a map book of the entire country, the only such book in existence. Subsequently, the project office was redesigned to include both GIS functions and database management. Now project management is also being actively used for the IT project.
After meeting with officials of the program, the “ambassadors” were invited to visit a water project site at Moddersprit. The small office at Moddersprit administers the prepayment system for water management by using a computer powered by a power supply that allows only 10 minutes of use at a time. Residents “buy” a smart card, which allows them access to the water supply. The PMI visitors walked through the process of obtaining water with a resident and sampled the water at the pumping station that has been constructed to supply water to this township of 10,000 people. (Shown above: PMI delegation leader Helen Cooke, PMP, sipping Moddersprit water at the pumping station.)
As primitive as it seems, this water station provides a vast improvement in quality of life for township residents, as it supplies clean, readily available water within the community. The water project is expected to provide major public health benefits as well as convenience. Yet the challenge is far from over. Spending on the water program increased by 212 percent in 1997, creating a budget deficit that will impact service delivery.
What project management has encouraged community development experts to understand, he says, are the systems relationships present in a project environment. “We can't ignore an external system, such as a social system, that can be disruptive; sustainable means environmentally, socially and technically sustainable.”
Mixing It Up. In community development, as in any other field from the visual arts to pure science, it's the juxtaposition of unrelated elements and ideas that usually leads to breakthrough thinking. In the social development arena, the time is right for this kind of chemistry to take place, creating not only opportunities for project management, but also better outcomes for the beneficiaries.
“In terms of social development projects,” Thompson says, “the agencies have to understand the feedback they get from the clients … the evaluation process they use is too cumbersome … by applying a project planning mindset, we can lay the whole thing out with good rational methodology, appraise the project, know enough of the variables that it can succeed. And even in those situations where the outcome or the solution isn't known when we start the project, we can use project management principles to create flexible instrumentation that can be used to generate solutions. For example, using the applied R&D model as a project design tool, we could do a quick turnaround, a three- or four-thousand-dollar project that could identify an approach. Instead of spending $150,000 and then evaluating to see if it worked, we'd do this quick R&D project, a sort of ready, fire, aim approach that gives more flexibility. You get in and out quickly, and if you can't find a solution you haven't lost that much.
These are some of the interesting twists that are developing, forcing bank staff and development staff to learn a whole new set of skills, says Thompson. His firm is busy training bank staff and clients in the community development field how to manage their projects, facilitate large-scale public involvement programs that bring a large number of stakeholders into agreement about a project design, train people in how to maintain involvement of stakeholders, and teach project management skills. “It's a major breakthrough in terms of community development,” he says.
What's In It for Me? This is good news for everyone involved, and for PMI, since the Institute's mission pledges the service of project management to society as a whole. Thompson is excited by the potential of new, projectrelated mindsets to change community development work for the better and to make good on the promise of community development in countries where, so far, project failure has been the rule rather than the exception.
“It has been very often the case,” says Thompson, “that projects have been designed backwards, supply-driven … you have a project and you persuade a beneficiary to accept it. The introduction of demand-driven client-centered project design has been a puzzle for most development agencies … but that's actually come a long way. We now understand that it's not useful to bring in foreign project managers to these projects because the benefits have to be sustainable beyond the end of the project; it has to be maintained by local social groups. So scheduling has to be put in the hands of the beneficiaries. The World Bank is now requiring the use of project methodology in new proposals, but hasn't figured out how to train the borrowers.”
CAN PROJECT MANAGEMENT save the world? Thompson laughs. “Well, I feel very positive about this. I think it's an exciting time for both disciplines. And you have to believe you can save the world in my line of work or you couldn't get up every day.” He advises PMI members around the world to connect with the community development people in their area. Let them know about the PMI chapter in the city they are in. Raise their awareness. Let them know PMI is there to help them meet the World Bank's new project management requirements. ■
Jeannette Cabanis is special projects editor for PMI Publications. As part of an internship for a master's in organizational change, she developed the survey instruments that were used in the community development project assessment described in this article. She can be reached at [email protected].
Reader Service Number 5010