| Theme | Country / region | Partners |
|---|---|---|
| Public Sector Strengthening | MENA | UNDP (Lead) Edward Carroll |
The Client
Working on behalf of UNDP, this support was provided to the Ministry of Energy, Division of Electricity (DoE) in the Middle East to identify and implement opportunities to improve the Division’s internal governance capability long term and address immediate governance challenges being faced by its current initiatives.
The Challenge
Based on early discussions with Ministry officials, many strategic initiatives, programs, and projects were governed in an ad hoc manner or by using different approaches, thereby making it difficult to coordinate decision-making, issue resolution and escalation, and results (impact, outcomes, outputs) both externally and internally. Additionally, the Ministry did not have any formal standards, policies, procedures or guidance on the best way to govern and manage initiatives. This is further compounded by the fact that the Ministry is expanding quickly and there are many new people joining who are unaware of previously agreed ways of governing initiatives.
The Solution
This project aimed to create five deliverables:
- Governance gap analysis of the DoE
- A published DoE Initiative governance “policy manual” and “standard”
- A published DoE Governance set of procedures and toolkit
- Application of the policy manual and toolkit to current initiatives
- Training module to be translated into arabic and delivered by a local trainer
To achieve this, our Antylles Expert proposes a four staged engagement:
Assess Phase: In the phase our Antylles’ expert met with Ministry staff to build a shared understanding of governance, its current states, and identify pain points. Together we reviewed and analysed the current state of governance in the organisation context and a current versus desired portfolio, programe, and project governance practices.
Design Phase: Once the plan had been reviewed and approved, our Antylles’ expert worked with key Deputyship personnel to co-design and plan an ideal future state governance in order to establish the governance organisational structure, roles, responsibilities, and authorities; governance-related processes, and required interactions.
Deliver/Empower Phase: Once approved, this phase operationalised the governance framework, functions, and processes; manage organisational change; completed various governance reviews; and measured governance performance.
Embed/Improve: Once the project had been fully implemented, the client, with the support of UNDP, continued to embed the changes into their day to day operations with relevant external support if necessary (e.g. advisors, mentoring, additional training etc); assess performance and define further improvement opportunities.
The Result
The project is currently ongoing, but with the delivery of the standard and the governance standard operating procedures, the client achieved a major milestone in the institutionalisation and codification of the new approach. This then enabled the ability to train and mentor senior managers with governance roles and create the organisational incentives for all staff to govern project the same way.
Contact our expert with direct experience in this case study: Edward Carroll.