Institutional Assessments

The purpose of institutional assessments is to identify strengths, weaknesses, threats and opportunities of organizations in order to craft plans for their future development.

Institutional assessments are also an essential first step to identify needs for institutional strengthening projects.

Assessing institutional performance in terms of relevance, efficiency, effectiveness and sustainability of organizations is at the core of our methodology.

Institutional performance is triggered by how an organization uses its capacities, maintains its motivation, and relates to its environment.

Swiss Consulting earned a sound track record in facilitating institutional assessments for a variety of organizations, including government offices and NGOs in Vietnam , Lao PDR , Cambodia and Thailand.

Definition

Institutional assessments are used to identify strength, weaknesses, threats and opportunities. Their purpose is and to draw lessons learned for the future development of an organization by measuring institutional performance in terms of relevance, efficiency, effectiveness and sustainability of organizations.

They are also an essential first step to identify needs to be covered by projects that aim at improving performance of organizations.

How is institutional performance measured?

Institutional performance is the result of the way an organization uses its capacities, maintains its motivation, and relates to its environment. Institutional performance is assessed in terms of:

• Relevance : does the organization meet expressed needs of its stakeholders, does it constantly adapt to their changed needs?
• Effectiveness : How well are the goals achieved?
• Efficiency : How well are institutional and technical resources used to obtain the results desired?

Sustainability (technical and 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.

Methodology of Institutional Assessments

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

• 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).
• Internal motivation : The internal motivation drives the members of an organization to perform, and includes institutional culture, history, mission, values, and incentive systems.
• 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. The external environment includes the economic, political, socio-cultural, environmental and technological context the organization operates in.

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

Our approach to Institutional Assessments

Depending on the specific needs of the client, Swiss Consulting uses a combination of self-assessment and external assessment.

The "ownership" of the organization to the assessment process is of crucial importance. Institutional Assessments should be a tool for capacity enhancement, a learning-process that allows organizations to develop managerial skills, in particular planning skills. 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 also increase the possibility that the findings/recommendations are realistic and formulated in accordance 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.