Now – wash your hands!

Scientists have long established that washing hands with soap makes a a crucial positive impact on health and hygiene (see WELL factsheet).  But how to get soap used in very poor communities who are unaccustomed and perhaps cannot afford it?

For a quick read, see the brochure Handwashing with soap: why it works and how to do it from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine.  With pictures!  This emphasises the need for behaviour change and how it could be achieved.

Here is a brilliant poster of the ‘F-diagram’ from the Loughborough University Water, Engineering and Development Centre (WEDC).

For a more strategic view, there is The Handwashing Handbook – a detailed guide for developing a hygiene promotion program to increase hand washing with soap aimed at a national level.  (As an aside, this reads like it was written by business analysts and could serve as a case study in many kinds of development initiatives.)

An alternative to donated aid is the micro-franchise model of distribution which can go beyond just soap to include a broader range of healthcare products – see Healthy Entrepreneurs Foundation as an example.

The charity Global Soap Project and the associated Clean The World Foundation work together to  recycle unused soap from hotels and distribute them via NGOs.  I love Global Soap’s infographic of their business operation “on one sheet of paper”.

Now wash your hands!

Fun and games

An excellent way to help people learn is by using games. They are good because they usually work for groups and so promote social interaction and because they are often playful. This makes learning fun and the association of the intended learning content with a positive emotion has a reinforcing effect. In the case of business games, there is often a competitive element such as between teams or working against the clock. The reality of the competitive business environment is thus represented, as well as other realities such as limited resources.

One famous example is The Beer Game which is a simulation of a multi-layer distribution chain that shows the dynamic effects of time delays in manufacture and messaging.  A system view of this is that there is high latency in the feedback between supply and demand, which usually leads to instability manifesting itself as high or low stock levels, delivery delays and cash flow problems.

A great source for business training material including games is the www.mindtools.com web site.  The full Mind Tools toolkit contains more than 700 management, career and thinking skills.  There is a subscription fee, but many resources are available free of charge.  Topics covered include: leadership,  team management, strategy, problem solving, decision making, project management, time management, stress management, communication skills, creativity, learning skills and career skills.

My favourite frameworks

1. de Bono’s Six Thinking Hats – for organising creative debate.
2. Mind maps – to organize creative ideas.
3. The Zachman Framework (and honourable mention to Rudyard Kipling’s Six Serving Men) – for a comprehensive information system architecture.  Consider also TOGAF.
4. The Dewey Decimal System – to organize books and all manner of physical artefacts.
5. Porter’s value chain and the similar Business Model Generation Canvas – to organise information about enterprise and planning a business.
6. Belbin team roles and Myers Briggs – to organise ideas about people, teams and careers.
7. The Graves Model – to help thinking about personal and organisational growth including the social aspects.
8. UML – because it is a graphical language, it provides a very flexible framework with which to think and describe information systems.
9. The Pareto Principles (80/20 ‘rule’) – for giving rule of thumb guidance on how to spend time and money.
10. TRIZ (teoriya resheniya izobretatelskikh zadatch) – the theory of inventive problem solving

Six Honest Serving Men

Poetry today!  We just don’t get enough of it in the world of business analysis!

I KEEP six honest serving-men
(They taught me all I knew);
Their names are What and Why and When
And How and Where and Who.

(Rudyard Kipling)

These ‘serving men’ (or prime interrogatives) form a useful framework in any investigative situation.  But they are only a starting point – for example, you may need to ask five whys, not one.  When it comes to ‘who’, you could be asking who are the customers, actors, owners, as in CATWOE analysis.  ‘When’ carries meaning of start/end time but also of duration and the dependency between items leading to a necessary sequencing.  And of course there are the classic business case questions – how much will this cost and who is going to pay for it!

Money central

Here is a frequently-found structure that business analysts should be aware of – the ‘hub and spoke’ movement of budgets and money between a central part of an organisation and sub-units.  As organisations grow, they reach the point where the finances can no longer be controlled from one single administration.  There are simply too many transactions involved, the decisions need to be made locally by people who are closer to the situation, or there may be tax or currency reasons to separate the ‘child’ from the ‘parent’.  This is now a recipe for tension, as there will continue to be ‘interesting discussions’ between the central and the peripheral units.

I call this a design pattern because it is a standard approach to dealing with the problems of scale.  It is found in multi-national corporations, but also in third sector enterprises.  For example, the Scout Movement in the UK operates this way; at a national level there is a flow of funding towards the centre via an annual levy.  At a local Scout group level, there can be similar behaviour between the central group funds and the sections (Cubs, Beavers etc).  Large church organisations works this way too.  The processes and business rules around these inward and outward flows of money can form a rich source source of ‘improvement opportunities’!

Anglican mission

In an earlier post, I wrote about the acronym MOST as a framework for strategic review.  The M stands for Mission – the underlying reason the for business to exist.  A good example from the Church of England and the Anglican communion worldwide is its ‘5 marks of mission‘:

1. To proclaim the Good News of the Kingdom
2. To teach, baptise and nurture new believers
3. To respond to human need by loving service
4. To seek to transform unjust structures of society
5. To strive to safeguard the integrity of creation and sustain and renew the life of the earth.

These were developed in 1984 [as an aside, you wonder how a world scale organisation has lasted nineteen centuries without such a mission statement – maybe it is not as important as we think – or the church had a previous equivalent?].

It is interesting to contrast these statements with the Millennium Development Goals ( written in 2000).  Apart from the specifically religious marks of mission numbers 1 and 2, the goals are essentially the same, although the MDG are more specific (poverty, hunger, education, health) all covered by ‘responding to human need’.  Environmental sustainability is there, as is structural reforms – covered by the MDG ‘global partnership’.  So it looks like the CofE got there first!  The MDG are backed further specific targets, monitoring systems and programmes of work – albeit with a very short time scale (2015) – but the 5 marks of mission are not.  So the MDG are more action oriented, whereas I suspect the 5 marks of mission had more of a uniting rather than a directing purpose.

The Millennium Goals

Anyone involved in any kind of international aid or development work should become familiar with the United Nations Millennium Development goals to relive world poverty.  They were adopted on 18th September 2000 by the UN General Assembly as the United Nations Millennium Declaration.

In summary, they are:

1. End poverty and hunger
2. Universal education
3. Gender equality
4. Child health
5. Maternal health
6. Combat HIV/AIDS
7. Environmental sustainability
8. Global partnership

Specific targets around these goals are used to monitor progress and aid and development organisations often have to justify funding on the basis of working towards the targets/goals.  Full details including progress reports can be found at the UN MDG web site

 

Crowdsourcing

Crowdsourcing is the act of taking a job traditionally performed by a designated agent (usually an employee) and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people in the form of an open call (says crowdsourcing.org).  It can be used to gather opinion (as in surveys and discussion blogs), intellectual assets (as in open source software) or investment funding – sometimes referred to as crowdfunding.

The theoretical basis for this has been published in the 2008 masters thesis at the Helsinki School of Economics by Sami Viitamäki The FLIRT model of crowdsourcing – Planning and Executing Collective Customer Collaboration.

Crowdsourcing is a way to seek funding for your social enterprise or community project.  One example of a business that manages the crowdsourcing for community projects in the UK is spacehive – but note that crowdsourcing.org lists hundreds.

Information security and the C. I. A.

Information security is a big issue for most social mission organisations.  In many countries there are laws and regulations around information, especially that held on computers.  For example, there is nearly always information held about people which should be correct, used in the proper way and only available to those who should have it (some principles behind the UK Data Protection Act).

The three basic objectives for information security are easy to remember with the acronym CIA:

• Confidentiality – the information is protected from those who should not have access to it.
• Integrity – the information has not been corrupted (and you are confident of this).
• Availability – the information has to be available when required eg not prevented from being accessed by a person who needs to have it.

These principles and the way in which an organisation can build a management system to ensure compliance are described in detail in the international standard document ISO/IEC 27001 Information Security Management Systems.

The Three E’s (and a few more …)

How to measure progress?  In Soft Systems Methodology CATWOE analysis, the intended transformations of a situation are identified and planning takes place so that there is action to improve. Some tests for the transformations are Checkland’s classic categories E1, E2, E3:

• E1 – Efficacy – is the transformation producing its intended outcome?
• E2 – Efficiency – is the transformation being achieved with the minimum of resources?
• E3 – Effectiveness – is the transformation achieving the higher or longer term aims?

To these original three, others have added

• Ethicality – is the work being done according to correct principles?
• Elegance – is it pretty?  Not just visually, but operationally ie not clunky.  This can be an indicator of a mature, refined, smooth operation working well.
• Environment – does the work improve or damage the environment?