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VQ | Value Quotient

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🛒 Cart before the horse? 🐎 (Another post explaining some of what VQ is all about…) Skipping to the measurement of value and impact without doing the appropriate foundational work leads to poor analysis, limited insights, and wasted effort and resources. Let us paint a familiar scenario. An organisation decides to go to market to procure a consultant to help with measuring the impact of their actual or proposed activity - whether at the project, program or organisation level. They have good intent, and genuinely want to use the work to develop understanding, learn from what they are doing, and be able to communicate their impact internally and externally. After procurement, the consultant starts to ask background questions. Does the organisation have an established impact focussed strategy? Has an organisation-wide impact framework been developed? Who is the audience of the work? Has a logic or framework been developed for the specific initiative? What were the objectives of the initiative? What data has been collected? Who has been consulted? When the answers are light on detail, the consultant continues to press on with delivering their scope of work. There is a fixed budget and timeframe. The outputs are high-level assumption based estimates, informed by limited data and insights, and poorly aligned to the broader strategic direction of the organisation. The learnings are limited, and the whole process does nothing to move the client forward in terms of their maturity around value and impact. The work serves the initial purpose poorly, and then sits on a shelf collecting dust. What is the alternative??? Start by laying the right foundational understanding and constructs to build out value and impact maturity over time. Consider things such as: ▪ What is our value / impact context? Do we understand our relevant market, sector, geography, and key stakeholders? Do we understanding what truly matters, to whom it matters, and what our role is in the broader coordination of outcomes for society? ▪ What is our impact ambition? What are we all about? How does this translate into our mission and broader strategy? ▪ What are our resulting objectives and KPIs? How do these cascade across the organisation? How do they align to frameworks relevant to our broader stakeholder landscape? (e.g. Measuring What Matters, SDGs etc.) ▪ What processes and tools do we have in place to embed all of the above in our day to day operations? ▪ What data can be collected to measure our impact at relevant levels? Do our people have the right capability to navigate and implement these considerations? While not all of the above needs to be solved, progressing in these areas leaves behind ongoing uplift in the capability of an organisation to navigate impact and value. There is still a time and place for one off reports, but we would love to see more organisations looking to lay the right foundations first.

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Kristy Hornby

Associate Director and ELT member at Grosvenor Performance Group | Passionate social justice advocate

6mo

Yep, see this all the time Mitch! Sometimes our clarification questions in the procurement process are longer than the RFP specs 😅

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