Land Admin SystemsSummary
Draft for Ken's approval
Strategic management is about building and sustaining performance into the future. That is essentially what international aid sets out to do. This chapter explains what Strategy Dynamics (SD) is, what it can do and how it works, with four underpinning principles and the steps of the approach.
Workflow is given for two situations. The first is testing improvement proposals and choosing a strategy before investing, which is the focus here. The second is helping to monitor progress during implementation.
The chapter covers performance over time, improvement objectives and performance indicators, the language of system dynamics (stocks, flows, feedback loops, delays and management decisions) and the schematic of the core structure (SCS) of the system that needs improving.
A detailed worked example is set in a Land Registry. Aid once cleared its backlog, but the backlog later grew back to its old level. Building the SCS in stages, in country, helps a mixed design team learn together and fosters buy-in.
Key points
- Strategic management builds and sustains performance into the future, and the aim is to improve a system's performance over time.
- Graphs of performance over time show past performance, the feared future and the desired future, and raise the questions WHY, WHERE and HOW.
- A schematic of the core structure of the system can be drawn quickly, and it yields useful qualitative observations about operations.
- Building the schematic in stages, in country, gives a mixed design team a shared learning experience and fosters buy-in from those who will live with the results.
- The schematic is essentially qualitative, but it provides the material for building a quantitative SD model to test improvement proposals.