Programme Health Check
Our primary programme objective is to promote sustainable development for the benefit of the public.
Periodic programme reviews spread over the life of a programme can provide early warnings of issues looming and will assist the programme to remain on track to deliver the sphere objectives.
Our programme health check will provide an alternative view of all aspects of the programme, scope, and processes that will allow us to provide a support package to the programme manager, sponsor, and other key management stakeholders.
To get the most from the health check, we operate through the following steps:
- Approach: we identify who we want to involve in the process and how representative we want them to be of the Foundation.
- Timing: we identify the best time to perform the health check
- Build commitment and ownership among colleagues: those involved need to comprehend what the health check is, why the Foundation is doing it and what it will get from the process
The health check has been designed so that it is easy to gather data from as many participants as we want. Stakeholders can save their responses and return to them at another time and leave comments alongside individual indicators to either explain their scores or provide suggestions for improvement.
Once we have the results, we investigate the scores thoroughly and take stock of the findings. Benchmarking the results alongside other similar firms assists us to prioritise the areas we want to improve. A training to analyse and interpret the results is a vital part of the process as what emerges from these discussions should be an accurate picture of current practice in the Kayndrex Foundation.
There are two phases to developing an improvement plan: prioritising capacity building needs and planning the strategic approach. After we have decided what to focus on, we write a development plan detailing how we are going to make the improvements. This could also be applied to form part of an organisational strategy or business plan.
There are a range of online resources including:
- Practical handbooks with incident studies
- Step-by-step how-to guides
- Best practice standards and principles
- Diagnostic tools that assist identify organisational strengths and opportunities in capacity and performance
- Organisational performance and impact measurement strategies
- Links to relevant bond training
Applied properly a programme health check, can be a proactive and powerful instrument to objectively determine how well the programme is performing relative to the objectives, vision, and blueprint as well as any relevant processes and standards.
It is vital to validate the foundation of a programme has been completed and in place, including vision, stakeholder management, governance, and organisational structure, to support the objectives before committing to start.
After that, there should be clearly documented, health check milestones planned at key points in the programme, logically when the various stages of funding are due to be released or when the vital decisions are required to be made by the programme board or stakeholders to allow those decisions to be informed.
The report will clearly show an overall health assessment, any issues and risks identified and recommended actions. These recommendations could range from moderate changes in governance all the way to ascertaining if the programme is still viable.
Make Sustainable Choices | The Kayndrex Foundation 