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This area of the site was written for very experienced trust fundraisers.

Cross-team services projects

One of the challenges of cross-team projects is that they’re usually built around the existing structures of the charity. So, if your project requires communications, advice or referrals from another team, these staff aren’t where they “should” be in terms of the most effective project management. You’ve got a few options, here:

1. Don’t worry about it, if it’s not a major issue. If all they do is add a bit of value, you just need to make that clear and no one should think your project is at risk of failure on that ground.
2. Tasking the first senior member of staff that they have in common with final ownership of the projects. This option is the best for how it should look on paper – I’ve had projects rejected because of a lack of clarity in terms of management. The problem can be that the first member of staff that all project personnel have in common may be the CEO! You’ll also need to know that the relevant senior manager will be okay with owning this project and that they’ll deliver. I’d build in a formal internal management group that meets every so often, so there’s a practical mechanism in place, as well as an organogram.
3. Occasionally charities will agree that the “awkwardly placed” staff member (necessary and skilled/experienced for the project, but not in the project management chain) can be functionally managed (as opposed to line managed) for that bit of work, perhaps by a senior manager responsible for the main team. Clearly there might be some politics around that. Otherwise there’s no issue – they just need to be treated within the project management in the same way as any other project member.
4. A fall back position I’ve tried is to have the main project team manage the budget and effectively pay the other team to do the work. So, you refer to the outside team as cross-charging the main project team. If the team in the other department didn’t perform, they could effectively take the work “in house” within their own department in some way (e.g., bringing in freelance help).  Internally in the charity, you refer to the budget as the main service team’s budget, but they’ve agreed to use part to pay, say, Comms to produce the materials. This seemed to satisfy the assessor. As money talks, it would probably have worked, too! (We didn’t actually get the money, think for other reasons.)
5. Site all the work in the one department. As the great management theorist for this, Alfred Chancler, argued, structure should follow strategy. You’d have to think how to ensure specialist support for this member of staff if their work is very different (e.g., Comms) – it would be another reason for an internal steering committee, for example. It can also lead to ongoing internal politics.

If you’re positively selling a diverse structure, as far back as 1967 management theorists have argued that the most effective structure involves both strong differentiation between units and strong integration (Lawrence and Lorsch, Journal of Administrative Science, 1967). Such a set-up is robust in terms of being able to respond to a changing environment – a good thing to be able to argue, presenting a potential weakness as a strength. 

Starting projects effectively

“Gall’s law” says that any complex system (e.g., a complex project) that you try and introduce won’t work in practice in the way you planned it. If you want something to work, the better approach is to introduce the simplest version you can and then build in complexity as you go on.

Clearly that applies to complex projects in a location. However, it is also a strong argument for starting something operating in different places in the least number of places and then scaling up. 

Something I’ve not seen described is how you do that. That’s not necessarily a bad thing unless you’re writing a massive project description. However, when I have needed to write in more depth, what I found I hadn’t appreciated is that you scale up by studying the pilot:

• Mapping the key processes. David Jenyns, author of a good book on creating business systems (Systemology) says to get a single sheet of A4 and map across the it the systems encountered by the customer (or translating into our context, the service user). So, for an advice service, those might include: hearing about the service (marketing); introduction to the service (materials and conversations explaining it to new people; collecting baseline monitoring data); being taken on (assessment, eligibility criteria, triage into the right level of service) or not (signposting elsewhere); getting information (creating suitable materials); getting advice (getting staff trained; accreditation with relevant quality standards); being represented (casework); finishing (exiting; collecting impact data; collecting service user feedback); and other things like getting to influence the service model.
• Identifying the values implicit in the service that are specific to that service or that are specific applications of charity core values. I’m thinking of things like: we will work with the following kinds of clients until they are fully independent, but these we will only meet the urgent needs for and signpost to another service; we are a light-touch, front-line service, or a service focused on intensive, longer-term, wrap-around work with small numbers of people with complex needs; we usually only stop when the service user is able to find work for themselves / actually in training or employment / we’ve worked with them for six months.
• Identifying the KPIs

You may not want to precisely transfer this model to other locations (one of the strengths of local projects is in being able to differ, to reflect the local people, circumstances and staff you’ve recruited into the service) but it gives you a meaningful starting point. When you say “This is an Action for Blind People service” (to pick somewhere that I’ve worked) these are the kind of things that means.

When you’re setting KPIs for the pilot site for the period after the pilot finishes, do remember that the staff will need time to actively transfer their knowledge to the organisation so that it can expand successfully into new sites.

Quality issues

Quality issues rarely come up strongly in our work. However, if they do, the work of W Edwards Demming can be worth looking at. Principles include:

• Having a clear, fixed purpose to the service
• Rely on inherent quality within the service – for example, recruiting staff capable of quality and with an ethos of quality – rather than relying on outside inspection as a way of ensuring quality quality
• Focus more on quality than unit cost
• Have a process for quality improvement
• Include a focus on staff development
• If you can promote high quality communication, do
• Remove any barriers to pride in workmanship (e.g., high KPIs, appraisals that focus on numbers rather than quality)

Does the project fit well in the organisation?

The projects that worry me most are the projects that don’t really fit the organisation and only have the backing of one person. They can work beautifully, but equally when something goes seriously wrong – e.g., the key person leaves – they can be where the most politics between yourself and Services arises. (Normally it’s just inertia, but I HAVE seen Services actively abandon projects with six figure funding.)

Funders can spot this, too and they do talk about it. Also, if you’re going to a funder for work in a different field from your normal one, they may have a ton of excellent services who are clear experts in that field queuing up for money. Why would they choose to fund your project, rather than one from the other field? I’ve had a couple of great projects that I knew I’d written up well but that were pretty “out there” in terms of the mission and work of the charity. They completely failed to raise any money.

The more you can tie the work into the charity, the lower the risk (and the greater the synergy with other services). The project management guru Michael Porter identifies three dimensions to this:

• It’s consistent with everything else you’re doing.
• It reinforces whatever else you’re doing.
• It optimises effort.

Minimise path dependence

All things being equal, choose the configuration of the service that maximises flexibility: site posts in multidisciplinary teams, use outreach methods that bring people into sets of services, create or extend platforms and so on. A flexible service is more robust (especially important if it’s innovative) potentially more saleable internally and with funders, probably easier to approve (because you can stress the potential for change) more sustainable and you’re more likely to be able to formulate an exit strategy.

The shape of roles

To pick up Porter’s point about consistency with what you’re doing, if you are creating a role in the project that is too diverse, you have two challenges:

• Getting someone to fill it who actually fits the person spec. If there are two different professional backgrounds, for example, you’ll struggle to recruit.
• Getting someone who wants to deliver the whole job. If in Year 1 the post holder has to be a development officer, exercising a wider range of skills, but by Year 3 they’re just doing extremely repetitive work, you may have just built staff retention issues into your new service. A more satisfying role would be one they can keep building (in this case, especially).

You may need to bolt things on to satisfy the funder and internal interests. However, a strong role isn’t a rag bag of bits, but something someone that will attract a particular kind of person, to own and drive it.

You’ll need to carefully watch what Services are doing, with check-in meetings, if the role strays too far from the ideal. Otherwise, you may come back in 12 months and find that the subsidiary tasks, that really mattered to the funder, haven’t actually happened. (As you’ll guess, I speak from experience! Ahem…)

Degree of planning proportionate to size of project

A good project needs more control and paperwork if it’s big than if it’s small, because it’s harder to coordinate.

Reducing dependencies

As Josh Kaufman highlights in The Personal MBA, a business model (in our case, services model) that’s highly interdependent, with a lot of functions dependent on others, is one where there are a lot of opportunities for failure built in. 

That’s an argument, for example, for a project model based on generalists rather than specialists. We’ve probably seen how badly people in different silos can work together, but there are possibilities of unnecessary dependencies without that.

On the other hand, if people’s tasks are too fragmented and require too diverse a set of skills and motivations, a post-holder may struggle to get them done. So, there’s a balance to it.

Value for money and differentiation

This is an idea from marketing that is more about setting things up for fundraising than it is about getting the best project for the end user. It concerns the issue: will we seem to be value for money to the funder? Sometimes, for whatever reason internally, projects don’t look like the number of people going through offers great value. 

It’s occasionally a consideration for funders. I’ve had things rejected because they look bad value for money and as a funder, it’s something you can sometimes spot when you’re looking at a set of applications.

This isn’t something that charities are very good at spotting. However, you can research it perfectly well by ringing people in non-competing services of the same kind.

One answer to it is from the field of marketing. When you have a lot of very similar services, competition drives a race to the cheapest form of delivery (and in my experience of tender in the employment field, that may not be a race to real efficiency, but to delivering inferior services, or to easier-to-help individuals, However, I digress a bit…) So: how do you avoid ending up with what the funder will see as a slightly rubbish service that’s under-delivering?

One answer is to “differentiate” your service from the alternatives. Say, for example, you’re in the situation I was and being rejected for having an expensive Mentoring service. As long as it’s seen as a normal Mentoring service, it’s going to be vulnerable. I repositioned it as for the most vulnerable and hard to help – where you could see the costs might be higher – but a service like that could easily take a further step and reposition itself as a keyworking service, wrapping other services around it to ensure results for the individual, with mentoring as the main vehicle for delivery. Keyworking is recognised as being quite intensive, so this form of differentiation could help. In fact, because key workers are usually paid staff, it could even be cheaper than the alternatives.

The key with differentiation is to have differentiated enough that the people you’re talking to actually care. In the above example, saying I was working with a harder to help group didn’t actually cut it with my assessor (though it’s worked before). However, repositioning the work as a key working model based on mentoring did work for another funder that had funded various mentoring services.

However, if it was just me talking one language and the service doing something else, it would have been unethical. I was able to do this because, in that case Services were happy to sign up to it being a keyworking approach, with the consequences in terms of wrapping around services and thinning holistically, if we got them £35k p.a. through the application.

Further reading

As well as reading about project management, it’s worth at least skimming something on change management and organisational management. Quite a bit of project management is common sense, but I find that, when I don’t have a sufficiently deep understanding of the charity and its work, reading more about project management is one thing that helps.