What is Really Going On?

How to get a handle on the diversity of work that goes on inside a foundation?  

• How to be open to the level of detail required to answer this question...
  
  • ...without being overwhelmed?

It begins with understanding context.  In the graphic on the left, the Operations Assessment is shown as being one part of a more holistic undestanding of business technology planning: the linking of strategic goals, operations planning, business systems and implementation.

Without a sense of where an organization is going, an assessment process will become buried in detail.  Knowing where to look is a key success factor in a successful operations assessment.

Who Supplies the Information Needed?

It may sound obvious, but the real experts on what is transpiring within an organization is the line staff.  Too often an organization will bring in an outside "expert" to fix things without first listening to the staff.  Different sized organizations with different goals will do things differently.

The Operations Assessment draws upon the expertise of line business managers and staff, and uses the skills and experience of the consultant (from Yeager and Associates!) to organize, filter and digest this expertise.  The process builds upon any process mapping that may have already undertaken, and incorporates procedure manuals and check-lists.

The Assessment Framework.

In order to guide evaluation and focus on problem areas, an assessment tool gathers data on 450 data points concerning foundation operations. About two thirds of these indicators relate to intra-organizational functions,

The framework to capture this detail is illustrated on the right,  Foundation activities are divided between inward and outward facing systems, and in the data interface systems that integrate them. The branch of internal system requirements are covered in the questionnaire through 332 data points to assess the viability of solutions.  But the future of true foundation effectiveness is not in what happens on the inside, but rather how a foundation relates to its constituencies.  That is why the assessment framework also collects data on the foundations external presence, and how well its systems work together.

Rather than subject staff to a rather tedious instrument, the methodology relies instead on interviews with staff to probes the nature of the jobs they perform and the challenges faced.  Notes from these sessions are then used by the consultant to then complete the questionnaire.

• Working sessions with each department use a structured brainstorming technique to discover:
  • What functions are performed now?
  • What challenges are faced? 
  • What risk factors affect the accuracy, completeness and timeliness of the work performed?
  • What improvements can be made?
• Optionally, A formal input/output analysis may be completed, with each employee charting the work they perform:
  
  • Highlighting an exact picture of every contact the foundation has with each outside stake-holder.
  • Pinpoint functions without systems support.

For larger engagements, a discovery document is prepared for each department reflecting these discussions.  This document will serve as a baseline for further departmental process improvement.

Where is the Assessment Pointed?

Each assessment begins with an understanding of the unique goals of a foundation and are thus different. But what are some unifying themes?  

Yeager and Associates does bring its own experience to the table in any engagement.  The diligence of the "listening exercise" within the framework (soliciting and documenting staff input) is intended as a counter balance to this background, and to ground the assessment results in the foundation's context.  But consider this: the founder integrated his first investment accounting system into a foundation's general ledger in 1988, (a project covering several thousand restricted endowments and assets at the time of about $500 million).  A steady drumbeat of innovation led to a 1996 implementation of a comprehensive Customer Relationship Management System (CRM) that ultimately included single click access to back end transactions and market values (updated daily).  

So what is the slant that Yeager and Associates brings to any engagement? 

• The future for foundations is in:
  • tearing down the walls of processing,
    • between departments
    • between the foundation an its vendors
    • between the foundation and its constituents
  • redefining the roles of staff away from doing data-entry to serving the needs of clients,
  • enabling scalable technologies to handle high transaction volume,
  • engaging constituents with advanced communications platforms, and
  • promoting the direct interaction of clients with each other (with the foundation as fiduciary agent)
• At the end of the day, my work will
  • minimize the slice of philathropic dollars consumed by "administration"
  • propogate the number of mechanisms available for giving
  • maximize the engagement of donors with the needs of a community (however defined)
  • leverage this engagement and available giving mechanisms to increase giving.
  • improve the transparency of the process, beginning to end.

Cost Analysis:

There are aspects of the Operations Assessment that examine cost structures within foundations, and this work overlaps with the "Cost-Revenue Study" authored by the Foundation Strategy Group (FSG) and currently provided as a service of Community Foundation Insights,   (CFI, see http://www.cfinsights.org/home/).  The community foundation field is fortunate to have worked collectively on this project for some years, as it has defined and measured foundation costs using an activity accounting model.  It has also provided leadership to the standardizaton of codes and in the development of benchmarks.

Clearly both an Operations Assessment (from Yeager and Associates) and a Cost-Revenue Study (from CFI), provide analysis of the workings of a foundation with the purpose of improving its efficiency and effectiveness.   Both use the accounting system as a source of data in performing this analysis.  The difference:

• The Cost-Revenue study (CFI) is focused on assessing the line-of-business sustainability of a foundation (as in, which lines of business require subsidy and which produce surpluses).  
• An Operations Assessment (Yeager and Associates) addresses a broader context of operations beyond accounting.  It will use line-of-business detail where available and appropriate, but where not available it will fall back on proxy indicators, (often recommending further study (with CFI) based on preliminary results).  But the Operations Assessment data gathering moves beyond this to include a variety of other sources, including a survey of the management team, facilitated sessions at the department level, analysis of planning documents and the conducting of an input/output analysis.