4 Programmes, projects and the project cycle
The world is complex, messy and dynamic. in order to design and manage a development intervention it is necessary to simplify, and therefore lose much of that complexity.
It is said that if you do not know where you are going, any road will take you there.
Projects and programmes are vehicles for doing this. A project is a set of actions that aim to produce qualitative and quantitative changes (results) in a defined target situation over a certain period of time (often called the project implementation period) with a defined set of resources. Typically, a programme is a collection of projects that contribute to the same desired results.
Not everyone calls these interventions ‘programmes’ or ‘projects’. The European Union (EU), for example, calls them ‘actions’. Here we use ‘intervention’ and ‘project’ interchangeably.
Programmes and projects are often designed, implemented, and evaluated by multiple teams with personnel often changing during the project lifetime. As a result, clarity of intent and implementation is important, as is the frequent refresh of project design by those involved.
Interventions take many forms, from service delivery to advocacy and campaigning work. The first step in project design is to identify the issue to be addressed, and then the best way to do this. It may be through influencing the system rather than providing a service directly. Influencing the system may mean changing government policy, but it may mean changing the practice of financial institutions or business organisations, or all of these and other activities. It may mean working in coalition with others, or it may mean working alone. The design process is intended to work through these issues and identify key issues to be addressed, and the most cost-effective ways to address them.
The project cycle is an important concept, which you were introduced to in Week 1, highlighting issues of process and time. This week focuses on design. This naturally sits within the second stage of the project cycle you were introduced to and comes once research and investigation during the exploration stage has revealed the need for an intervention. Arguably, interventions should seek to learn and improve throughout their lifespan, meaning that the design process will in some senses continue throughout the cycle. This ambiguity is something development actors need to be comfortable with. The project cycle is reproduced below in Figure 2.
Now complete the following activity.
Activity 2
You have learned of some the challenges of development, particularly at the design stage, consider the following question:
- What set of skills do you think a development actor would need to engage with these challenges?
Note your answer in the box below.
Discussion
Development actors need to have many of the skills that managers of companies and organisations need such as leadership, negotiation, scheduling, time management, critical thinking, problem solving, risk management and communication skills. But they also need a facility to understand the lived experience of others who are probably very different to themselves, strong listening skills and empathy. They need to be agile in their thinking and prepared to challenge their assumptions, changing course if the evidence suggests this is needed.
The mainstream approach to development is known as results-based management (RBM), where projects and programmes are planned, implemented, and evaluated within a results evidence framework (Eyben, 2013. p,6). As Eyben (2013) says, the tools of programming often take an inflexible linear results-based approach. This approach includes assumptions around how change will happen together with complex reporting structures and incomplete mechanisms to evidence outcomes.
Moreover, the expectations of donors can be unrealistic. Projects can quickly run into difficulties as it is realised the resources available are too few and the challenges to the existing ways of doing things too great to bring about the necessary change. This is compounded by development actors being engaged in completing extensive project documentation to satisfy donors which means it is often too late and difficult to reorientate the project. This has led many development actors to look for different and more flexible approaches to doing development.