Organisational Development Work

This post is particularly for my friends who have commented that I appear to be having a great time and not doing much work!!!

Following the staff retreat in December and several discussions at GPI, I was asked to shorted the length for completing the Organisational Development (OD) assessment by two months from end of April to the end of February! It was going to be a challenge but GPI and I were certainly up to the challenge! So I spent much of January designing the OD tool, researching about managing NGOs generally to increase my own knowledge, and then conducted 1-1 interviews with all staff members and also sought opinion from donors and people GPI work with as well as from the GPI girls. The piece of work grew and I found myself writing a paper that included suggestions from academic literature as well as from staff and external stakeholders.

It was a busy and challenging time for me, sadly made worse by malaria and Nan’s passing – but it was also enabling me to grow both as a person and professionally and I found myself relishing the challenge the work was giving me.

The end of the work was close and I completely redesigned the staff workshop I had originally planned – rather than re-cover the same ground as the interviews I wanted to explore more about some of the challenges raised regarding management and funding. Plus I also wanted the days to be interactive and fun. So I decided to use some new facilitation ideas and games to keep the days engaging and went through some of the findings and recommendations from the report. I’m so pleased to say that there was great engagement from the staff, my findings and recommendations were generally accepted (and praised) by the staff as being accurate and a good idea, and everyone reported they enjoyed the sessions. I also had a great time and had fun using new methodologies like drama and human statues which would not have worked so well with a more reserved British audience!!

Revewing the findings from my report

Human scultpure showing how staff want GPI to be structured!

With the outcomes from the workshop recorded, I had a week to finalise the report before my ship sailed to Cameroon – there was much frantic typing, several late nights and thankfully thanks to the best nepa power supply I’d ever experienced at the house the report was ready on time! All 50 pages of it have been printed for staff to read and emailed to everyone. So its vacation time for me!!! Thoughts on next steps to come after Cameroon!