CHAPTER 46
Rescue Mission
Project Management in the Helping Professions
A new commercial jet. A skyscraper. A software product. These are the kinds of deliverables that project management cut its teeth on, and with which project managers can readily identify. But increasingly, project management is being applied to enterprises where the ultimate deliverable might be expressed as something like “lessened human suffering,” “improved understanding of a social problem,” “a safer society for children,” or “an increased awareness of the arts.” Is the discipline of project management, as currently understood, applicable to projects where outcomes concern individual and social welfare, education, and development?
Every year, all across the globe, billions of dollars are invested in projects to alleviate poverty, improve public health, bolster infrastructure, and address other quality-of-life issues. Yet, until recently, project management has remained a foreign language to most staff members in the nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and nonprofit organizations who perform the majority of this important work. This chapter examines two branches of the helping professions—community development NGOs and not-for-profit organizations—to discover what barriers exist to employing project management discipline and tools to making the world a better place for all.
COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT: “THE PROJECT HAS FAILED US”
Early in my study of project management, one of the most moving experiences involved a project to measure participant satisfaction with a program that sought to improve maternal and child health in five African countries by improving household garden yields. In Africa, women farmers produce the bulk of crops for household consumption. Sorting through the questionnaires I had developed, and which had been administered in the field by a colleague, I came across one that was smudged with dirt and splashed by droplets of sweat. In neat, laboriously penciled script, an African woman had 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.”1
This unnamed woman, sitting perhaps in the shade of an acacia tree somewhere in the Kenyan uplands on a blazing June day in 1997, was the end-user of a multi-million-dollar, multiyear project that had some considerable successes: new, blight-resistant strains of crops introduced, and new farm technologies that conserved natural resources adopted. But like many projects aimed at improving quality of life in developing nations, this one was designed around the requirements of a granting agency, not those 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 the ATM software.
The Language Barrier
Why this gulf between two disciplines with so much to gain from each other? Partly, it’s an artifact of a siloed educational system. Community development folks come to their work from the social sciences, economics, agriculture, 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.2
Then, too, in the heady atmosphere of big government grants that once reigned, there was little emphasis on getting a project done right the first time, on time, and within budget. A culture developed of sinking money into five-year projects that looked good on paper and later sending someone out to evaluate whether or not the project had succeeded when the money was gone and the dust had settled.
In the 1960s, development agencies were briefly excited about project management scheduling technologies; however, in the absence of automated tools like MS Project, and given the degree of uncertainty in the environment, the existing tools did not allow enough flexibility to be truly useful. Frustrated and disappointed that project management had not lived up to their expectations, development agencies turned away from standard tools that came to be summarized in the Project Management Institute’s Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK® Guide), and developed their own tools, such as the logical framework approach. Now with so many user-friendly project planning, scheduling, and tracking tools on the market, there has been a resurgence of interest. Beginning in the 1990s, and led by initiatives from the World Bank (in partnership with Microsoft), project management became a regular feature of World Bank funded initiatives, and Humber University in Canada, among others, offers a master’s program in project management for international development.3
But much more than technology has changed in the environment. When institutions like the World Bank start contracting for project management training, 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 is true that incomes have increased somewhat in developing nations, the United Nations Development Program maintains that poverty cannot be measured in terms of income alone, but should be looked at as an accumulation of illiteracy, malnutrition, early deaths, poor health care, and poor access to water and urban services.4
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. By 2000, annual losses to developing countries from unequal access to trade, labor, and finance were estimated at well over $500 billion—ten times what they receive in foreign aid. In 1963, the poorest 20 percent of the world’s population held 2.3 percent of world income. Today, their share is less than 1 percent. The increasing income inequality is a cause for concern everywhere, because of the threat of political instability it brings, as well as because expanding markets require customers who are able to participate in them.5 Nevertheless, the United Nations holds that poverty can be erased in the twenty-first century if governments manage things better. 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 1990s. But to keep up, development agencies are going to have to do more with less, and do it faster and more effectively.
Convergence
In some ways, 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 is a necessity to involve the beneficiaries, because they will be responsible for sustaining the outcomes of the project over time. It is 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, 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.
At the same time, there is synchronicity in the way that project management and community development have grown as disciplines over the last thirty 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 somehow, 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. Nevertheless, the two disciplines are converging; it took time for development agencies to see beneficiaries as customers or stakeholders with a role to play in project design, but now they can turn to scheduling technology.
In project management it was the other way around: the tools worked fine as far as that went, but when they were applied to projects of more complexity, the discipline had to expand into the human dimension. Today, agile methods hold promise for both traditional project management applications and the nonprofit/NGO world. In particular, the use of adaptive models of management and leadership can improve evaluation processes that have been overly cumbersome, allowing planners to proceed even under conditions of uncertainty, using project management principles to create a flexible and iterative plan that is responsive to conditions on the ground and to stakeholder input.6
This increasing convergence is highlighted by the growth and activities of the Project Management Institute’s international development Community of Practice. Since a key part of building a profession is a mission of service to society as a whole, the institute and its associated membership groups take a keen interest in development projects these days, and offers an avenue to involvement for practitioners. A new, project-related mindset carries the potential to make good on the promise of community development in countries where, so far, project failure has been the rule rather than the exception. And it helps the project management profession become just that: truly professional.
NONPROFITS: THE BIG BUSINESS OF HELPING PEOPLE
Most people—including nonprofit managers and board members themselves—do not realize the potential power of nonprofit business. Statistics show that the “third sector” is necessary to our survival as a civil society:
• If the nonprofit sector were a country, it would have the seventh largest economy in the world, according to gross domestic product (GDP) data compiled by the World Bank.7
• With 9.4 million employees and 4.7 million volunteers, the nonprofit workforce consists of more than 14 million people and 10.5 percent of America’s workforce, and contributes almost $322 billion in wages to the American economy. In fact, the nonprofit workforce outnumbers the combined workforces of the utility, wholesale trade, and construction industries. Nationally, the nonprofit arts and culture industry generates $166.2 billion in economic activity every year—$63.1 billion in spending by organizations and an additional $103.1 billion in event-related spending by their audiences.
• United States nonprofits possessed over $2.6 trillion in total assets in 2007—up from $500 million in just a little over a decade.8
• The sector has been growing at twice the rate at which the private and public sectors are growing.9
Demands on the nonprofit sector continue to grow as government strives to slim down by shedding social program responsibilities. For many communities, welfare reform has meant that the safety net once provided by government programs must now be stitched together from a patchwork of underfunded, volunteer-dependent private charities, many of which concurrently face the loss of government grants. At the same time, individual contributors, an important source of revenue, have grown more cynical about nonprofit leadership in the wake of several widely publicized scandals involving mismanagement at major nonprofit corporations. Also, recent economic upheavals began to impact charitable giving in the first quarter of 2009. Clearly, an infusion of creative management solutions is required if the nonprofit sector is to meet the challenges of this combined market expansion and resource crunch.
From Charity to Business Enterprise
One way that many nonprofits are striving to close the gap is by developing and launching nonprofit business initiatives. From the mail-order gift catalog that supports public radio programming to the thrift shop that helps underwrite a local soup kitchen, nonprofit business initiatives are multiplying rapidly. But while these endeavors offer a bright future for those organizations that successfully launch and manage them, they also pose a great risk. Frequently such enterprises are hampered by the fact that most nonprofit sector managers and staff have little experience or skill in ordinary business management—and none in the project management areas that are so critical to kicking off a successful new endeavor.
In addition, the kind of annual event-based fundraising that has always been the bread and butter of small nonprofit entities can benefit from the application of project management tools and techniques.
But project management is not a language that is spoken in most nonprofit organizations. A glance at the bible of nonprofit management, the Jossey Bass Handbook for Nonprofit Leadership and Management (1994), yields no references to project management and only a few pages concerning risk management and management control systems. While some organizations—notably healthcare institutions and larger nonprofits such as the March of Dimes and the Nature Conservancy—have signed on to the project management bandwagon, the small organizations that form the backbone of charitable and educational work in the United States still, from a project manager’s point of view, operate in the dark. What are the barriers?
Special Management Challenges
Those versed in project management who seek to put the value of their expertise to work in nonprofit organizations will encounter numerous special conditions. For example, in grant-funded organizations, project startup can be complicated because no design and planning work can be charged to the budget until the funds to support it exist; yet design and planning must take place in advance of even applying for a grant that may eventually fund the project. In essence, many projects must accomplish the entire startup phase before any resources—either monetary or human—can be allocated.
This Catch-22 situation is compounded by the fact that, especially in small nonprofits, staff resources are limited and frequently seriously underpaid. Employees in the nonprofit sector often grumble that their love of the work is expected to reimburse them for the long hours, in lieu of money—a deal that few architects, engineers, or financial planners would accept no matter how much they loved their professions. Thus many nonprofit managers are reluctant to ask for unreimbursed extra efforts from an already overburdened staff to get new projects off the ground.
Volunteer labor is usually the resource that is relied on to solve this problem. However, anyone who has ever steered the board of a nonprofit or has managed volunteers knows that this resource base is high-maintenance and extremely variable as to time commitment, knowledge, and accountability.
When a project is mission-critical it frequently becomes the purview of a volunteer board of directors—a volatile animal at best, as any nonprofit manager can tell you. “Effective governance by the board of a nonprofit organization is a rare and unnatural act,” the writers of a 1996 Harvard Business Review article stated flatly.10
Tension between the governing board and the managers of nonprofits is ubiquitous; board members may have personal agendas that conflict with the mission of the agency and that can lead to scope definition problems that, being emotionally charged, are difficult if not impossible to resolve.
While boards of directors are often skilled businesspeople, they usually do not have any of the special knowledge or experience necessary to effectively manage nonprofit organizations; this lack is exacerbated by the fact that most nonprofit managers themselves have little or no business management experience. Instead they tend to be subject matter experts in whatever the mission of the agency happens to be, whether it is domestic violence prevention, arts education, or environmental protection. So comparatively basic skills such as cost-benefit analysis, business communications, and strategic prioritizing can be missing. Business-savvy board members may be speaking Greek when they talk of risk management or change control with the program’s managers.
In addition, it can be hard for a nonprofit to steer a straight strategic course when it is primarily funded by grants and contributions. Most grants and many large contributions are earmarked for very specific purposes, so the program manager has little flexibility in how to expend the organization’s resources. Often an organization’s progress toward its goals resembles the track of a sailboat beating against the wind: it must zig and zag according to how the latest grant or contribution forces it to frame its objectives.
Introducing Project Management to the Nonprofit
Despite the differing environments, when nonprofits convert to project management principles the payoffs can be rewarding for the organization and all its stakeholders. Project management is such a needed set of ideas in nonprofit management that the Harvard Business Review article cited earlier actually proposes projectizing the work of the board (without, of course, ever referring to project management as such!). The article recommends that nonprofit boards abolish committees and “organize around what matters,” forming temporary task forces (read: project teams) to accomplish time-limited, goal-driven projects.
Project management experts who have worked in the nonprofit sector are very enthusiastic about the discipline’s untapped potential to make these organizations more effective. While it is a bit of a stretch for people who work in nonprofits to take their long-term strategic vision and projectize it, shifting gears to project management can happen fairly quickly, precisely because foundations tend to fund organizations for specific projects. Within the familiar context of a grant application nonprofits can learn to do scope definition, define the specific problem, and define the period of time. Grant applications force an organization, in most cases, to develop measurable goals—in terms of numbers of people served, for example. Most foundation grants are actually couched in project management terms: steps, sequence, time limit, budget, and performance measures. The problem is principally one of perception. There tends to be a lot of project work going on in nonprofits that is never called a project. There is never clear scope containment; the plan is never thought through in project terms. Nonprofits need to learn to look at their programs in terms of a series of projects that have some strategic direction, and then seek funding for specific projects to serve a specific purpose, as opposed to asking the community to “fund us to do our ongoing good work,” which can be a challenge to measure. Additionally, funds for “ongoing good work” can be raised by operating nonprofit businesses—and this is also an area where project management skills will be of tremendous benefit.11
Table 46-1, drawn from the experiences of a project management practitioner, tallies the differences between the for-profit project management environment and the nonprofit environment.
While many nonprofits strive to operate on business principles similar to those in the corporate world, the realities are quite different for a nonprofit manager. Project management techniques require some customizing to fit the volunteer and donation-driven organization.12
Project management techniques are most easily applied to such endeavors as annual fundraising events or a capital campaign (a major fundraising drive devoted to raising capital, usually for a major investment such as a building). Practitioners who hope to “proselytize” in the nonprofit world must remember to keep it basic: basic risk management, developing a schedule, and scope definition. Over time, when the staff members of a nonprofit see that they can pull out the timeline and work breakdown structure from last year and reuse them to pull off the annual fundraiser, they begin to see the usefulness of it. Even something as simple as establishing meeting agendas with action items can be something of a revelation.
TABLE 46-1. DIFFERENCES IN FOR-PROFIT AND NONPROFIT PROJECT
CONCLUSION
The burgeoning nonprofit section is one in which project management and the organizations it helps to improve can grow together, providing opportunities for the profession while bringing much needed skills to nonprofit management. All that, plus you get to feed the hungry, build a museum, combat AIDS, or save the rainforest.
REFERENCES
1 Jeannette Cabanis, “ ‘The project has failed us’: the case for more and better project management in community development,” PM Network (February 1998).
2 More information about the Logical Framework process can be found on the MindTools website: http://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/newPPM_86.htm.
3 Robert Youker, “The Nature of International Development Projects,” Proceedings of the 2003 PMI Global Congress, PMI, 2003, http://www.pmi-idsig.org/content/PMI%2003%20ID%20ProjfromBobY.pdf.
4 United Nations Human Development Report, posted annually at http://hdr.undp.org/en/, offers statistics related to the impacts of globalization, trade liberalization, and development aid projects.
5 “For richer, for poorer,” The Economist Online, posted October 13, 2012.
6 Karen R.J. White, Practical Project Management for Agile Nonprofits: Approaches and Templates to Help You Manage with Limited Resources (West Chester, PA: Maven House, 2013).
7 World Development Indicators Database, World Bank, updated July 2, 2013, http://data.worldbank.org/data-catalog/world-development-indicators.
8 These and other statistics on the nonprofit sector can be found in The Nonprofit Sector in Brief: Facts and Figures from the Nonprofit Almanac 2011: Public Charities, Giving, and Volunteering, published annually by The Urban Institute, and posted at http://nccsdataweb.urban.org/kbfiles/797/Almanac2008publicCharities.pdf, or at the National Center for Charitable Statistics page: http://nccs.urban.org/statistics/quickfacts.cfm.
9 Economic impact statistics for the nonprofit sector are continually updated on the Council of Nonprofits website, http://www.councilofnonprofits.org/?q=economy/npstatistics.
10 B. Taylor, R. Chait, and T. Holland, “The new work of the nonprofit board,” Harvard Business Review (September–October 1995), p. 36.
11 Jeannette Cabanis, “Reinventing the Business of Doing Good: Project Management in the Nonprofit Sector,” PM Network, April 1998.
12 The exhibit was adapted from one shared with us by Pat Barber, PMP, who first published about working with nonprofits in Project Management Consulting News, an Electronic Data System (EDS) internal newsletter, in October 1997.