NGO support toolkit (English)  >  Technical support  >  Project management 

Design and planning

Project design and planning uses the overall project brief and the results of the assessment process and translates them into a detailed action plan.

A detailed project design can considerably enhance the effectiveness and efficiency of a project by identifying everyone who needs to be involved in implementation of the project (both within the organisation and also in other organisations) and ensuring that they share a common understanding of the project plan and their roles and responsibilities in implementing or managing it.

Project plans and planning systems can come in many shapes and forms with different levels of detail and complexity, depending on the scale of the project, the number of different individuals, departments or agencies involved in implementation, and the degree to which the project’s chosen methods and approaches are well-established or innovative and experimental.

The support that NSPs may need to offer NGOs or CBOs will vary considerably. For example, a simple project such as the extension of existing services to a new locality which only involves a few staff and a single manager, may only need a short planning process leading to a simple one-page plan. By contrast, a project which aims to develop new services for an unfamiliar client group (such as peer education amongst a hard-to-reach population) may involve the coordination of the efforts of more than one agency, more than one manager, numerous staff and volunteers, and several different professional disciplines. Such a project would be very hard to manage and could easily drift off course without a detailed project plan.

In some organisations, there may be essential preliminary work needed to establish an organisational planning system, which defines the format in which strategic planning decisions are recorded and the way in which the different elements of the organisation will work together effectively to achieve these strategic targets. In all organisations the planning system for any particular project will need to work in harmony with the existing operational management systems.

Issues to consider

• There may be a temptation to accelerate implementation by almost doing the planning for the NGO or CBO, rather than actually providing technical support. There needs to be a correct balance between helping NGOs do the planning, and giving them the tools to do the planning.
• There is no guaranteed way of ensuring that project plans will be used as living documents rather than just ‘sitting on the shelf’ unread. This is why it is important to ensure that planning processes are integrated into the operational management of the organisation.
• There may not be a pre-existing consensus about the most suitable format for recording the project plan. CBOs and NGOs may require different kinds of planning systems at set up, during the lifetime of the programme and to develop an exit strategy if the programme is of limited duration.
• It is important to guard against changing purpose arbitrarily, or ‘on a whim’. The purpose of project design is to guard against this and try to ensure that purposes are revised through a strategic process of re-planning in response to identified changes in needs.

Related themes

Project design and selection

Project design

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