Indepth/BCG Hlabisa Meeting
The Strategic Planning process with the Boston Consulting Group is coming on as scheduled. This final meeting will also host the Rockefeller Foundation Director for Africa, Dr Cheikh Mbacke. Sixteen (16) Indepth Site members are participating in the meeting, namely Nouna, Navrongo, Rufiji, Agincourt, AMMP, Brac, Matlab, Operations, Magu, Ifakara, Pujowero, Manhica, Butajira, Rakai and Filabavi.
Comments from Indepth Sites
RUFIJI
"The strategic planning process that INDEPTH and Boston Consulting Group have facilitated for INDEPTH DSS sites came just at the right time for the Rufiji DSS. We are a relatively new site, established like many others originally as a project instrument with a single donor. However those days are rapidly coming to an end and the need to take a longer term view of how to sustain such a site comes to the fore.
We benefited tremendously from the templates and the example of the Ifakara DSS Strategic Plan which gave us a clear path of critical steps to guide our thinking. The process forced us to come together as managers and stakeholders to set out and agree on a Vision, a Mission, and our Objectives for the site. It also forced us to think systematically about how we were going to achieve these ambitions. Moreover, it helped us have a common view of these issues and in the end produced a document that helps guide our developmental activities and our approaches to partnerships.
Finally, it helped us to think creatively and come up with ideas that we had not even imagined at the outset of the process. The skills learned in this exercise will help everyone who participated in applying the approaches to other settings. Having written our plan by ourselves using the materials provided by INDEPTH/BCG, the subsequent meeting in Accra helped us refine some of the issues through peer-review from other sites and BCG, and helped us to polish our strategic plan document.
One useful exercise that we enjoyed was grouping things by "lumping and splitting". This helped us to coherently re-regroup our 12 objectives into 3 major categories which were more clearly traceable back to the Vision and Mission. Hopefully more sites will be able to take advantage of the BCG facilitation at the Hlabissa meeting. The process of getting to the Strategic Plan is as important as the plan itself and we encourage all INDEPTH sites to give it a shot."
"I've been closely associated with the INDEPTH-BCG initiative over the past several months. The business planning process - its science and art – is clearly critical for any leading organisation, and can help lay essential long-term foundations. I particularly valued turning my own vague ideas into systematic, inter-connected and clearly considered strategic components of an overall plan - both at Network and site level."