Frank Beadle de Palomo on "Management Tips"

...if it’s a brand new intervention is probably very good, if possible, (a) to get the staff, potential staff person, involved in the design of the intervention. You know, having someone as a consultant that you might be interested in hiring -- and, of course, no promises -- but work with them as a consultant so that they can actually help you design. You can see what they’re like in terms of working with them. You can also see where their strengths are, and you can give them a feel for who you are. The second thing is, if possible, always understand that when you hire someone brand new, it’s going to take a while for folks to kind of acclimate to your organization. Folks don’t just come in and do the project. Folks have to come in, understand the organization, get a feel for things, understand what they can and can’t do; and so I think it’s always good to get staff in as soon as possible. And when you can’t -- when you really just can’t get anyone and you’ve got to start because the funder wants you to start the project -- think of your current staff and think of how you might be able to borrow some staff to do certain things, bring in other folks to handle what they’ve been doing.

I think when you look at the packages that are available like Microsoft Project manager is an excellent job, but it only does certain things. It lets you load in what you know about, the different steps, break up the hours. What it doesn’t give you really is a flow chart in terms of accountability. So, for example, it doesn’t do the connection. Like you can’t graphically make it so that the person who is doing the field testing of the intervention is meeting back with the project director, and that the folks who are doing the focus groups are meeting back with the intervention designers. You can’t really build in those kind of steps. You can do it, you know, written in a written part of the text; there’s no way to show that visually. And sometimes I think taking the opportunity -- you know, what we usually do is when we begin a new intervention, a new project, we get all the team together, put newsprint on all the wall, and start literally in figures first scoping out what the relationships are. So if someone’s working on the materials, brochures, or new tools for learning, who has to interact with them? Is it just the project director? Is it the trainer? Is it the person who’s in the field recruiting? If someone is doing the actual training, who do they have to interact with? Because that’s one of the things that most of these tools, whether it’s a project manager doing some PERT chart or GANTT chart kind of programs out there, they don’t quite show those kinds of relationships.

Also I know that, you know, GANTT charts are a very popular thing. Time-saving charts. Anything that can just help you up front start to ask the question, if we’re going to do ten trainings, how much time does it really take? You know, yeah the first one probably is going to take longer because it’ll be the first time we do it. But what might we be forgetting? Are we forgetting the amount of time it takes to secure the space, to recruit the train, the participants? If we’re going to do it within a health department or CBO, what’s their lead time so that they can book the rooms and have people on premises? Also, what other kinds of things you’re forgetting. If we’re working with very low income or folks who have day jobs and we’re bringing them in to training, who’s going to take care of their kids? Who’s going to take care of all other kinds of access issues? And unless you kind of talk that out to ad nauseum at the very beginning, you’re probably going to forget a lot of those steps.

And you’ve really got to ask every question possible. You know, if we chose to do the training at 7:00 in an area that the highway runs by and it’s rush hour, you’re probably not going to have people there at 7:00. You know? Think through all the pieces because even the way you design your intervention in terms of its setting really has a lot to do with what it takes to get you there if it’s not on your premises. Or if it is on your premises, what other kinds of things is it competing with? And I think those are the kinds of things that none of the tools will help you with. We had an experience where there was a project that was trying to recruit women who had been in domestic violence situations with their spouses or their partners, and the same -- in the same building in the room next door -- we were recruiting men to do work around teen pregnancy. And so what you had happening was you actually almost had partners kind of next door to each other and it scared off the women. And I think that something that no one thought through, and thought, “What else is happening in our space at the same time because we want to make sure this is a safe space?”

I think we all try to do budgets that we try to be as proactive and as thoughtful as possible, but there’s always when you get to the end and someone forgot the press conference. Someone forgot that there’s going to be a media event. Someone forgot that there had to be some kind of wrap-up report. And so I think one of the things, first things, to do is to figure out first of all what’s my evaluation phase? How much funding does that take? Put it aside. Don’t spend it. Don’t think that you have it on your budget. Pull it away. The next thing is to think, okay, if the project ends on May 31, how many days really will it take for me to write up what happened, share that with the funder, clean up any other processes. If it’s a final report, will I need an editor? Will I need someone to vet this? Does it have to go back out to the community? How much is it going to cost me to put stamps on the report? All those kinds of things, because those are the things we forget and that’s usually what a director or an executive director or the head of the program will start screaming about and saying, “What do you mean, you need an extra $3,000?” So I think thinking through what other kind of tail that your project has? What is the tail that’s going to be left behind the door when it closes? And try to anticipate those things as much as possible. Media is something that most folks don’t plan for -- that if you have a successful project, you write up a great report and you disseminate your findings or what you’ve done, oftentimes there’s a media hit that someone might want to know more about it. The local news, you know, television, other folks want to talk to you; and folks usually aren’t prepared because they’re slammed on the project, the staff might not be there anymore. Who is going to be able to carry that on? And so that’s the other kind of thing to think about is if the project is ending and there are no more funds to continue to, continue the activity and folks are going to leave, who is going to be the institutional memory for what happened? And is there time for them to kind of get up to speed with the folks before they leave so that they understand what to talk about afterwards? And, again, that’s something that none of us really do very well and we need to think about that much more.

I think you have to think about your quality assurance, and one of the first things about quality assurance for any kind of manager is a while ago talking about a process where you would talk about all the interrelations and connections of a project and where things have to go and who has to look at them and who has to be involved. A manager needs to think very much up front, “Where is it I want to keep my finger on this process?” You know, is it that I think the staff might be a little rough around the edges in terms of the quality of research skills, so I want to be part of that. Is it that I really want to watch the very first training and the last training because I want to see what, if they’ve improved, how good it was all the way through. Do I want to be in situations where I’m asking the consumers or the clients some questions about what did they think about the program? It’s a little bit tough because as a manager, any time you step in the room, the staff are going to be a little bit nervous, so you need to think about how you do that without kind of scaring folks or putting folks off. But as a manager, you’re responsible and so you need to think where what are those pieces that I really need to check on? You might have the best staff in the whole world -- and many of us are blessed to have fabulous staff -- but you still need to have kind of an eye on things because you never want to get surprised by what didn’t happen. I think the other thing is communication. If you’re a good manager, you instill with your staff a strong sense of communication in terms of, “Tell me what’s going wrong. Tell me what’s not working. I don’t want to just hear about the success. I want to about, know about, what’s not working because I want to be prepared in case I get a question from the funder, I get a question from some political something, and I want to know how to respond to it. So, if we had a training session that was designed for young people and no one showed up, I want to know what the issues were. Why didn’t they show up? Don’t just tell me it didn’t happen. Tell me why it didn’t happen.” I think a good manager doesn’t just ask for yes/no. They ask for why or how or what, and so I think that’s part of that process.

…if you ask about the why and about the how, it gives you, the manager, the ability to not micromanage but to give advice and say, “Well, actually, I worked in a similar situation and when this happened, the one thing you might try is this or this.” Versus “do this, do that.” I think if you can kind of hit that tone, it does help. It helps the staff grow and it helps you the manager be able to manage a few more things without having to do everything yourself.

I think formal evaluation data is really important. If you’re going to evaluate, you should be looking at what you’re getting and understanding what the data are kind of indicating. But I think again it’s asking what’s not working is almost more important than what’s working, because we are intending for things to work and if it works we tend to know why it did, but we don’t usually know why things don’t work; and you can often, often learn more about what didn’t work. So even with the funder, if a funder wants to tell you that, “This didn’t work and I’m not happy with this,” engage him in a discussion and ask him, “Work with us for a moment to help me understand what it would look like if it had been successful. What would have been different here? And let us also respond to you to explain a little bit about kind of what’s been going on and why we’re here.” Because, again, it’s not just one of those things of saying, “Oh, it’s great, it’s great, it’s great,” because especially if you’re funded by someone in the community, a health department funding a community based organization or a foundation funding a community based organized, in the same community the funder’s going to know that something didn’t work and so it’s good to kind of get that out there, put it on the table, and just talk about how you’re going to learn from that lesson.

I think a couple of things to think about is don’t underestimate startup. Startup is something that folks always think, “Oh, we got the funding. It starts on May 1. Let’s just do the work.” And oftentimes startup means a whole lot more. If it’s a brand new activity that you’ve never done before or what you’re kind of stretching to do, think about like three months to get your staff trained and acclimated to understand what it’s about. If it’s something that you’ve been doing and it’s an add-on, think about a month. But don’t ever think that because it got funded May 1 that means May 1 we’ve got to have services. You really need to build in that time because, if not, you’re going to have a train wreck later on. Folks are going to be running, trying to do things too quickly. They wouldn’t have taken the time to really think quality-wise through what has to happen, and that’s a pressure that no one wants. But clients don’t want that either because, as consumers, they’re going to notice that things are a little bit short shrift or that they’ve been done kind of crazily; and so really thinking about startup I think is one of the things that most folks, most of us, don’t do very well.