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Securing a thorough sense of the organization’s capacity is the second link in the chain that aligns strategic goals with operations capacity.
The keys to navigating the sheer volume of detail within an organization are:
- Selecting the right techniques to guide the approach.
- Selecting consultants who bring foundation expertise to the table.
The Business Operations Assessment gathers insights to challenges across the organization in a non-judgmental problem focused manner. See below for a full description or (download PDF)
Agility in a Time of Change:
The Business Operations Assessment
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The reality of foundation operations is not simple. There are many kinds of stake holders, many flavors of product, odd accounting rules, archaic development practices, and governance that extends to be inclusive of a diverse community.
The assessment engagement employs a variety of methods to collect and filter data. Exactly which instruments are used depends on the size of foundation and complexity of its needs. These methods focus on the operations on the ground and have been developed and honed to meet the needs of foundations.
At its very essence the assessment is a listening exercise: it helps the organization listen to the expertise of its own business managers and staff. The Operations Discovery Process assembles departmental teams and leads them through a brainstorming exercise. A discovery document serves to journal the results.
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The Life Cycle of Change
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Two survey tools provide a more formal framework for complex situations.
- The Comparative Assessment Tool gathers data on 450 points related to foundation operations, providing a guide to evaluation and problem focus.
- The Input/ Output Analysis is a detailed study completed by each employee based charting work performed. It highlights client touch-points, roles, systems support and frequency.
The pages that follow show samples of the table of contents of a discovery document, charts from a comparative assessment, dashboards from the input/output analysis and a sample list of all inputs received from nonprofits by one foundation.[1]
For more information, please Douglass Yeager, (
This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
502-693-1800).
Samples
1. Operations Discovery Process
The Operations Assessment draws upon the expertise of line business managers and staff in all of the tools, but none more dramatically than the discovery process.
Working sessions with each department use a structured brainstorming technique to inventory a functional overview of the department, identify operational challenges and capture ideas for improvement. Given a safe environment within which to express it, the staff expresses real concerns, real risk, and real pride: they do not hold back.
A discovery document is prepared for each department reflecting these discussions. The results are circulated initially to each team, and build upon any process mapping exercises already undertaken. Great care is taken to edit the narrative to remove “judgmental” language and to focus on the problem.
The table of contents at right shows the breadth of this time-intensive process.
2. Comparative Assessment Tool
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A summary assessment describes capacity across all operational aspects of the foundation’s work.
- Internal Systems
- Externally facing systems.
- Data Ecosystem
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3. Input/ Output Analysis
 For a foundation truly looking to re-examine their business operations, an Input/ Output analysis is the tool of choice. Each process is named, and every input to, (and output from), the process is identified. This charts the work performed, highlighting client touch-points, roles, systems support and frequency.
- How many touch-points do we have with each of our constituents?
- Which department handles the majority of a particular group of constituents?
- Which processes are well supported by systems? Which need re-working?
- For a constituent (e.g. a nonprofit), what exactly does the foundation receive from them? Send to them? What kind of process do these tasks relate to?
- What differences emerge between the FSG categories of Acquiring, Maintaining, Granting, Leadership and Other?
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- From the stakeholder’s perspective, who in the foundation is their primary contact?
- In this example, PhilSvcs dominates relations with donors, meaning other departments need to follow their lead.
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- A rollup of task detail (in this example 1,186 tasks were inventoried) is broken out by role,
- system support,
- frequency, and
- whether it was internal or external.
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- What processes are On-System vs. Off-System?
- By Department.
- By Externally facing v.s. Internal
- By Frequency of task
- By constituent
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What is This?
- A list of all "touches" for a constituent. For example:
- For Nonprofits, list
- Inputs received
- Sorted by Department receiving input
- By Process
- Show Task and indicate system support.
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For an introduction to services offered by Yeager and Associates, see http://www.dougyeager.com/joomla/services.html
[1] Examples shown are snapshots lifted from actual “deliverables” provided to clients under contract. To protect the confidentiality of these clients, all identifying information has been removed, and samples from multiple clients mixed interchangeably.
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Operations Assessment
