The document outlines a presentation on designing and managing corporate social responsibility (CSR) projects with verifiable impact. It notes that despite massive spending, poverty levels continue to increase. It questions why impact has been so limited and poses the challenge of achieving impact with evidence. The opportunity of new CSR regulations in India is discussed, which provide freedom and no constraints. Part 2 then discusses experiments and lessons learned in designing new ways to manage projects, with implications and ways to work together going forward. The overall goal is to establish a seamless approach for projects, programs and policies to maximize impact through evidence-based evaluation and continuous improvement.

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Part 1 - Murari Thayi, Part 2 - M S Ashok, Cirrus Management Services Pvt. Ltd.
22 November 2014
CSR With Verifiable Impact:
Designing & Managing Projects: New Ways

2. 2
Part 1
Presented by Murari Thayi, PgMP, PMP

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Preview of Presentation
Part 1 - Problem, Challenge, Opportunity
• Fact: Numbers of poor increasing despite massive
spending.
• Question: Why so little impact?
• Challenge: Impact with evidence; how?
• Opportunity: New CSR regulations, few constraints.
Part 2 - Action, New Ways
• Experiments and lessons.
• New ways to design and manage projects.
• Implications, ways forward, working with you.

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Fact: Poverty in Developing Countries

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Fact: Poor in South Asia – UNDP, HDI 2014 Report
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
India Bangladesh Pakistan
%ofpopulation
Vulnerable
In Poverty

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Fact: Poor in India – Numbers Vs %
100M
200M
300M
1950 2014
70%
28%
Numbers
of poor
% of poor
Source: UNDP, HDI 2014 Report Claims of reducing poverty are misplaced

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The Question: Why so little impact?
• Donor agenda drives projects, not socio-economic
imperatives, unfortunately.
• Loud on spending, giving & volunteering, but
• Silent on impact with evidence
• While numbers of poor increase each day.
• Embedded institutional resistance to innovation;
everywhere: governments, NGOs, international donors,
even corporates.

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The Challenge: How?
• Conventional approaches not working, but “how to
solve the problem” is not clear.
• But corporates haven’t done much better.
• Can they? They do seem to have better potential.
• So government asks corporates to solve the problem.
• The costs of failure are small for corporates; the
rewards great: public image, and leverage with
government. Will corporates take the opportunity or
fritter it away?

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The Opportunity. Take it, create new ones
• New CSR Law effective 01 Apr 2014.
• 2% of corporate profits, companies with net worth
>500 Cr or revenue >1000 Cr or net profit >5 Cr.
• Freedom, no constraints. Education, health, fighting
hunger, poverty, malnutrition, promote sanitation,
safe drinking water, gender equality, environment,
heritage, relief, infrastructure, livelihoods, skills.
• We offer new, practical ways forward.

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Opportunity: Spend in 2014 – 15 (in Rs Cr)
0
5000
10000
15000
20000
25000
30000
35000
40000
45000
50000
09-10 10-11 11-12 12-13 13-14 14-15
Education
Health and family
welfare
CSR
Donors
Other govt. programs
* 80000 (2014 -15)
Source: Accountability Initiative,
Centre for Policy Research

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Part 2
Presented by M. S. Ashok

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About Us
• Professionals, socio-economic change, private company.
• Our constituency.
• Policies, programs, projects.
Changing praxis at the cutting edge, leaving behind
what does not work, overcoming minimalism.
Overcoming institutional pathologies.
New standards, benchmarks, impact audit.
• Goal: A seamless micro to macro approach for projects,
programs and policies; tracking each input-rupee, each
beneficiary, “kaizen” - an ERP.

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Opportunity, Challenges, New Ways: Case Study
• An opportunity came after ten years; a livelihood project
(microfinance). Combined with other assignments across
domains, the opportunity was magnified.
• The main challenge: Microfinance with livelihood
improvement as the primary objective. Profit vs viability.
• Chronic microfinance challenges: last mile logistics, high
service delivery costs, fidelity, customer defaults.
• Other challenges; stakeholder priorities at odds, skepticism.
• Seven years of experiments, learning and unlearning.

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Experimental Outcomes
• Direct Outcomes: service quality (accessible, friendly,
customer transaction costs/ time near zero), low default
rate (<0.5%), service delivery costs halved (<5-6%),
interest rates to customers dropped (<20%), customer
incomes on upward trajectory, a robust objective function
and an emerging ERP for microfinance.
• More importantly, strategic outcomes:
 A big bag of new perspectives, ideas, tools.
 A prototype of a new kind of service delivery vehicle.
 An embryonic architecture for a generic ERP.

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A Generic Architecture: Five Facets
1. Mandate: stakeholders, resources, direction, momentum
2. Processes: inputs, activities, outcomes, quality
3. Structure: trans-organizational people, teams, links
4. Intelligence: brains, hardware, software, decisions
5. Evolution: scale, innovation, integration, transformation
• These five form an ever-changing jigsaw puzzle, full of
circular loops, causes and effects, micro to macro.
• Complexity demands sophistication. Unknowns, grey
zones are identified, marked out, targeted, and kept
under attack. Unceasing improvement, “Kaizen”.

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• The architecture enables
design + management, projects, programs, policies;
Analysis, improvement; projects, programs, policies;
Identification of winners, of losers designed to fail.
• It enhances established practices, is a force multiplier, a
lens to focus resources and effort on the goal, cutting
wastage, leakage. It prioritizes problems and issues. It
does not displace any existing good practices.
• It enables you to develop your own ERP for continuing
improvement.
• Next, an overview of the five facets.

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Mandate: a quick overview
Who?
Externals
Ifs, buts
What?
Delivery Costs?
When?
Evidence, audit?
What if?
Caveats
Price charged?
Who pays, how?
Resources,
reserves

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Mandate: key elements
 Strategic direction, objective continuum, based on:
Stakeholder synergies, conflicts, asymmetries,
entrenchment, domination; (customers, teams, donors..).
Realities, risks, uncertainties, externalities.
Grey zones, black boxes, knowledge/ information gaps.
Moral, statutory, donor and other imperatives.
 Deliverables, impact, accountability, evidence, unit costs.
 Resources; generating, deploying, balancing, reserves.
 Direction; maintaining, modifying course: multiple
exploratory attacks, learning, reinforcing success.

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Mandate: key elements (…continued)
 Strategic Accountability; responsibility, price for failure,
credits.
 Dissonance; nominal, actual, implied, obsolescent, deviant
mandates.
• The mandate is a living entity, with real time links to a set of
databases, analytical reports and a feedback mechanism,
reviewed and revised as things change.
• It is the cockpit, control tower and schedule rolled into one.
• It is not a document sitting on a shelf.

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Mandate: Common Problems
• Most are vague, disjointed. Common weak points:
? Direction: Where to go, from where, how, costs.
? Who is to go, who will get them there, doing what.
? How sure is everyone, what do they know, not know,
should know.
? Crosswinds, headwinds, tailwinds, drifting off course.
? When.
• Frameworks like “logframes” struggle with these
questions, but usually fail to address them. They are top-
down, and weakest, blind at the grass roots. Needed: a
cutting edge framework, systems; an ERP.

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• Objective Function: Maximise value for money.
• Examples of considerations/ inputs:
Loan, grant, recurrent subsidy? How much?
Can the loan-grant-subsidy mix be changed? Through
what changes in operations, teams and structure?
Competing claims on available funds?
Potential impacts of competing claims. Doubling impact is
as good as doubling funds.
Review points, consequences of mid-project cut-off.
• Module Output: Short-list of decision options.
Example of a Module: Project Funding Decision

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Processes: a quick overview
Input Process Outcome
Probability
Decisions
Process Networks

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Processes: key elements
 Building blocks: input-process-outcome chains,
attributable, probabilistic outcomes.
 Flexible process networks, intervention/ decision nodes
with resources.
 Automation, routinization of simple processes,
maximizing parallel activities.
 Surveillance, anticipation, contingencies, redeployment.
 Detachable, repairable, “re-engineerable” segments.
 Hygiene and progress monitoring.

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Processes: Common Problems
• Usual weak points:
? Weak integration of processes, weak links between
inputs, processes, outcomes, impact.
? Poor recognition of uncertainties, probabilities.
? Firefighting approach to key decision nodes and
allocation of resources.
? Compartmentalization.
? Weak attributability, non-recognition of externalities.
? Silence, denial of weaknesses.

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Structure: a quick overview
Teams
Communications, Data Links
Decision, Control Nodes
Logistical Links
Homeostasis

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Structure: key elements
 Trans-organisational, people, teams, links.
 Homeostasis: Dynamic, recombinant task-teams.
 Integration: Communication & logistics.
 Stakeholder inclusion, management, motivation, de-
personalised factual feedback and assessment;
customising tasks to skills, workload balancing.
 Momentum: Coordination & troubleshooting nodes;
detachable, independently “re-engineerable” units.
 Fiduciary safeguards, contracts, cascading legal action.
 Distributed power, strategic redundancy, control nodes.

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Structure: Common Problems
• Static, hierarchical; little or no flexibility.
• Little or no participation for many stakeholders.
• External locus of control.
• Asymmetries.
• Fiduciary inefficiency, few preventive measures or none.
• Predominance of the individual over the institution; locus
of knowledge, memory mostly with individuals.

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Intelligence: a quick overview
Analytics, Feedback
Data
Fiduciary Oversight
Resources, reserves, impact,
efficiency real-time
monitoring, decision support
Integrating the five facets

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Intelligence: key elements
 Monitoring
Internals, externals, pathologies, opportunities.
Stakeholders.
Risks, uncertainties, externalities.
Fiduciary oversight.
Grey zones, black boxes, knowledge/ info gaps.
Integrity and dissonance.
 Dynamic systems, protocols; databases, analytics with
real-time feedback & learning; micro- to macro-loops.
 Security, access management, disclosures, misuse.
 Performance support, “mandate at risk”.

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Intelligence: Common Problems
• Often absent at institutional level.
• Poor integration of mandate, processes, structure.
• Secrecy, even where transparency is obviously needed.
• High costs, overinvestment.
• Poor response to needs at the cutting edge, excessive
focus on concerns of higher management, lack of
flexibility.
• Few warnings if any of disaster, none timely.
• Big gaps in institutional knowledge, memory.

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Evolution: a quick overview

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Evolution: key elements
 Iterative, cyclical reviews, project concept to closure.
 Learning, change, re-design, micro to macro loops.
 Scaling up, reinforcing success, economies of scale.
 Continuous validation and review of the mandate.
 Higher level synergies; integration across domains.
 Realistic, constantly improving standards and
benchmarks, esp. for mandate and processes.
 Organic evolution, adaptation, like open-source codes
in software; go beyond funding to resource generation.
 Conceptual leaps. CSR, governance reform, tax reform.

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Evolution: Common Problems
• Stakeholder time horizons, stakes usually very short.
• Superficial, very little conscious thought to evolution.
• Learning, improvement, correction rare during project.
• Post-mortem evaluations fail to inform new projects.
• Evaluations tend to be politically correct, laudatory and
careful not to damage reputations.
• Radical changes extremely rare.

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Conclusion

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• That was a brief outline: the architecture, five facets.
• Some of it may look familiar. The way they come
together, interact… and the detail… that is different.
• The detail: too much for a single session; best
understood in the context of your specific situation.
• Much of what we say is so different from accepted
practices that some big mental leaps will be needed.
• This also has wider implications: for business projects,
organisational design, operations and public policy.
• This is for everyone: corporates, NGOs, international
agencies, governments, private donors….

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• Take a leap in time, fast forward, five years.
• Visualize your own CSR program, primary education.
• A center of excellence with a proven ERP
evolving, scaling up, powerful impact.
a beacon, new standards and benchmarks.
supporting, networking, incubating other projects, big,
small, corporate, government, international, NGO.
Networking, developing synergies, globally.
• Visualize other corporates like you, each specialized in a
domain, education, health, livelihoods. Massive scale
and impact…..super synergy, mega ERP.

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We can make it happen, together.
Stay in touch
Cirrus Management Services Pvt. Ltd.
Consultancy…Action…Research…Capacity building
www.cirrusworld.org
cirrusworld@gmail.com
M. S. Ashok
Ph: +91 99000 98594
Murari Thayi
Ph: +91 96115 88893

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Thank You
We’ll take as many questions as time permits.
We’re also available here today after this session,
and later on telephone, or email.