Application exercise 2
Save the Children is a nonprofit organization that operates in rural Africa to ensure children attain the right to survival and proper growth development. A significant part of its activities to ensure survival is to sensitize the community to embrace pregnant mothers' safe delivery through health facilities. As a non-governmental organization, performance reviews are significant to identify challenges and their solutions (Dyczkowsk, 2016, p. 2). The organization identified five main performance challenges in executing its mandate.
First, the target communities' needs were not fully satisfied in realizing the goal of the organization. This lack of satisfaction is due to the lack of community leaders' inclusion in the decision-making processes and engaging them as part of the organization's mission. Realignment of the organization's objectives to the needs of the community it seeks to serve is a significant priority in the performance of the organization (Berman, 2006, p. 12). There need to be efforts to invite the community leadership in the organization's mission and seek their input on important program implementation issues.
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Secondly, the organization has also employed too much staff compared to the financial resources available. Most of the personnel are delegated to performing evaluations of the programs through conducting surveys. However, some of these tasks can be outsourced to consultant firms on a need basis. There is also a need to employ community volunteers to help execute some of the program activities since the early 2000s are using outsourcing as an effective strategy in enhancing performance by improving the efficiency of resources (Crumpton-Young, 2019, p. 7).
Thirdly, there is inadequate coordination among the different programs and departments within the organization to drive the organization to achieve its mission. Proper leadership needs to be employed to improve the harmony and coordination in the organizations. The fourth challenge in the organization is the misuse of funds in activities that do not contribute to achieving the organization's mission. There is a need to adopt proper financial forecasting, which has a proven history of increased performance in managing resources in the organization (Berman, 2006, p. 12).
Lastly, communication within the organization and to external clients and stakeholders is a challenge. Instructions are often misunderstood, and there exist constant wrangles among the staff of the organization. Activities that involve the communities are also not adequately communicated to the leaders of the leaders. This lack of timely communication to the target population and other stakeholders contributes to the poor delivery of services to the target group. Organizational development should be implemented to improve communication, which is critical in the organization's performance (Berman, 2006, p. 20).
In the perception of the client who in Save the Children's case are mainly the target communities, the biggest challenge among the ones listed is the lack of satisfying needs. Communication is also a concern, according to the client, who often gets frustrated by the disorganization of planned events and activities in the community. The other major challenge that the client prioritizes is the misappropriation of funds, which would have effectively met their needs.
Application exercise 4
The notion that “managers need not reinvent the wheel" is an essential concept in performance improvement since it fulfills the need for efficiency. As Evan Berman notes in his book, globalization has established an environment where at any given time, there several strategies being used by many organizations in different parts of the world (Berman, 2006, p. 13). The ease of information flow in this period makes it possible to analyze and document the results of different strategies to be spread worldwide. Therefore, managers have to find out which of these strategies have been successfully implemented elsewhere and take measures to adapt them to their organization's situation.
Effective and efficient managers focus on results and are conscious of the utilization of resources. The time and resources required to develop new strategies specifically designed for the organization are a lot, which causes inefficiency in productivity within the organization. The risk of these strategies not working as expected is also a concern damaging the firm's effectiveness. Therefore, the measure of a good manager is not based on their ability to invent ingenious experiments to tackle common challenges in performance, but one who can identify a suitable strategy among the wealth of performance strategies that are being used worldwide (Berman, 2006, p. 14).
References
Berman, E. M. (2006). What is Performance? An Overview. In performance and productivity in public and nonprofit organizations (pp. ix-22). essay, Routledge.
Crumpton-Young, L. L. (2019). Strategies for Enhancing Productivity and Performance. Key Productivity and Performance Strategies to Advance Your Career , 1–37. https://doi.org/10.1016/b978-0-12-799956-2.00001-2
Dyczkowsk, T. (2016, October). (PDF) Towards an NGO Performance Model - ResearchGate . ResearchGate. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/309188344_Towards_an_NGO_Performance_Model.
Septiyanti, R. (2020). The Enhanced performance strategy of Indonesian small entities. The Future Opportunities and Challenges of Business in Digital Era 4.0 , 16–19. https://doi.org/10.1201/9780367853778-04
Soares, C. (2015). Performance, Performance Testing, and Performance Optimization ∗ . Gas Turbines , 533–636. https://doi.org/10.1016/b978-0-12-410461-7.00010-9
