Interviewee: F7, PBA
Role: facilitator
Date: —
Interviewer: —
Interview Summary
Personas
Depends on partnership and maturity. Bigger organisations will have layers of partnership and programme managers (more like e.g. war child) and they will do a lot of the strategic thinking. For smaller partnerships the senior levels of the stakeholders will decide, facilitator is the connector and operational level will do implementation. When a partnership projects has proven itself to be succesful and starts to mature, slowely more sub projects will emerge.
Facilitator role
External facilitator. Facilitator is there to guide communication, manage expectations, transfer insights into narratives and financial reports, but not strategic role. A big part of the role is relationship management. Make sure decisions on strategic level are clearly and understandably transferred to the operational level (simple summaries of meetings), explain decisions and gather feedback in one-on-one meetings with partners, checking in to see if partners need help or have worries and make sure all the different partners are getting out of the partnership what they want (everyone is in essence still pursuing their own goals, not necessarily one shared goal)
Facilitator s relation to decision makers project leaders
Keep informed, report to, translate decisions into simple summary for operational layer
First phase start
In theory they say, build relationship and then do something. In reality you build the relationships by doing something. Until you do something to share your value, it’s hard for the stakeholders to believe this party is actually going to add value instead of just talking about it or doing something they assume would help but is not actually needed. Tend to get further with 1 on 1 conversations. In group there is a lot of hierarchy involved. When a senior partner is invited in the room, the rest won’t say anything anymore. Try to do individual meetings first and have a group meeting later in the process.
Second phase understand
They often already know each other in her area of international development which makes it easier. However, there is often a role to play to bridge the gap between strategic level and operational level. Often a memorandum Of Understanding / partnership agreement is signed. Problem here is that this gets signed on the high level. Local language, simple summaries are necessary so all the staff knows what they’re signed up to do. Big part of this is in person communicating new information.
Fourth phase experiment cocreate
Where the actual work is happening is generaly somewhere else, not in a shared place.
Fifth phase transfer
No response recorded.
Sixth phase finish
No response recorded.
Tools used
Mostly Whatsapp, Facetime or Signal. Reason: 1) easier acces: When wifi router is down/power is off, you can use (data on) your phone, your phone stays on for longer than your laptop, you always have it with you. 2) Gives them more confidence to answer; Worried about their accent or if English is good enough, need time to hear the question, understand it, work out if they know the answer, ask a friend if they don’t know, then answer. In call can be overwhelming, so messaging is preferred. monitoring_progress: | Because she is working for small organizations, she does this, but she imagines in bigger organisations, there are specific partnership and programme managers that monitor progress and make strategic decisions based on this. She mentioned that as a facilitator, it is actually important to keep track of all the ‘private’ goals of the various partners. Even though a collaboration has in theory one goal that aligns with all partners, every partner is still going into the partnership wanting their own outcomes. If you’re not keeping track of what everyone’s getting out of it, then things can go wrong.
Collaboration
Mainly face-to-face, big part is relational.
Specific painpoints
- Too much pressure on reporting numbers > partners feel as if ‘how’ or ‘what’ they’re doing is not important.
- Concerns about security of direct messaging platforms + you cannot close out access to all (prior) documents etc in a whatsapp group if someone is not part of the collaboration anymore and is deleted from the group.
Room for improvement
1)A clear timeline would be helpful as well, with phases of the project. Some don’t like to talk about the deadlines, because they only want to talk about the nice things. The cost of the ‘free’ benefits, is the data. You should have these conversations at the beginning; set expectations and discuss how the data comes in, how we will prove that we’ve done what we said we would do and work this out together. 2) In a partnership it is not that everyone’s going after a single goal, but actually everyone is still holding on to their individual reasons for being in the partnership. If one of the partners is not achieving its own goals, they start to question why they are in the partnership. So keeping track of your partners means keeping track of each organization’s kind of wins against what they all together want to achieve. Insights in this would be very useful to see if there is a partner not getting as much out of the collaboration as everybody else. Helps to see where to put time and attention in order to prevent them to pull away. Now she does this by personally checking in, but that becomes hard if the partnerships are larger and these questions focus on worries and needs, might still lack overview of progress on their goals (compared to other partner goals).
Platform requirements
Since she is working with developing countries, there should be some usability when the internet goes down so that it will add the information to the server when you’re back online. Possibility of low data mode for people to use it on their phone. Direct messaging is the main communication tool so should be there as well.