Institutional Assessments

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Institutional Assessments

What is an Institutional Assessment?
The framework for an Institutional Assessment is a tool to measure institutional performance in terms of efficiency, effectiveness, relevance, and sustainability.

It is used to identify strength, weaknesses, threats and opportunities and to draw lessons learned for the future development of an organization, particularly for non-governmental organizations and non-profit organizations.

The methodology used is similar to the one of project evaluations.

The basic assumption is that performance is the result of the way an organization uses its capacities, maintains its motivation, and relates to its environment. An Institutional Assessment is an essential first step in a capacity building process that helps organizations to improve their performance.

How is Institutional Performance measured?
Institutional performance is assessed in terms of:

Effectiveness: How well are the goals achieved?

Efficiency: How well are institutional and technical resources used to obtain the results desired?

Ongoing Relevance: does the organization meet expressed needs of “customers”, does it adapt their changed needs?

Sustainability/Financial Viability: Incorporates attributes such as institutional autonomy, leadership, learning capacity, ability to recover from setbacks, and adapt to changes that ensure sustainability and self-reliance.

Framework of an Institutional Assessment
The diagnosis conducted during an Institutional assessment examines the functioning of an organization in the following three dimensions.

1. Capacity (Structure and Operations)
Institutional capacity includes the attributes that an organization possesses or controls, and the ability of an organization to use its resources to perform, including:

Basic legal structure

Strategic leadership (structure, governance, leadership, strategic planning that set the direction of the organization)

Human resources

Other core resources (financial and infrastructure capacity)

Programming (ability to carry out its institutional role)

Process management (process management examines the way the organization manages its human and work related interactions)

Inter-institutional linkages (result from partnership and alliances): Ability of an organization to manage its external relationships.

2. Internal Motivation
The internal motivation drives the members of an organization to perform, and includes:

Institutional culture

History

Mission

Values

Incentive System

3. Relation to the External Environment
Characteristics and quality of the external context affect the performance of an organization. Organizations need to get support from their environment if they are to perform well.

Policy, regulatory environment

Economic, political, socio-cultural, environmental and technological context

This initial diagnostic process helps the organization to identify the key issues and together with the consultant, develop solutions to address shortcomings.

How is an Institutional Assessment implemented?
Depending on the specific needs of the client, Swiss Consulting uses a combination of self-assessment and external assessment.

Institutional Assessments should be a tool for capacity enhancement, a learning-process that allows organizations to develop managerial skills, in particular planning skills.

The "ownership" of the organization that is being assessed to the assessment process is of crucial importance. While strictly external assessments bear the risk that values are "imposed", i.e. the evaluation has to satisfy an external agenda, based on external perspectives, self assessment often lack credibility and fresh, independent perspectives.

Participatory approaches combine the technical expertise of the evaluator with perspectives from inside the organization. They teach the members of the organization how to collect and analyze data by themselves and guide them by making their own judgment. They increase the possibility that the findings/recommendations are realistic and formulated in accord with the organization's internal culture and overall goals.

Self-assessment should ultimately encourage organizations to extend assessments in a specific point of time to ongoing monitoring of performance.

Swiss Consulting recommends conducting "facilitated" self-assessments by including both internal and external members (facilitators) into the assessment team.

Swiss Consulting has performed institutional assessments for NGOs and Government Offices in Vietnam, Lao PDR, Cambodia and Thailand.

References: see CV of Daniel Keller
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