ORGANISATIONAL CAPACITY ASSESSMENT
Businesses grow, decline and die just like human beings. But, organisations grow and can maintain their status quo by changing their mission statements from time to time and any time if organisations have proper check list of their capacities and the threats and opportunities they face in their external environments. Experts and development agents recommend organisations, especially those in the charitable sector to conduct regular organisational capacity assessment just to help the organisation to improve performance.
Creating Focus
It helps to find out the strong and weak points of the organisation internally and identify the opportunities and threats externally. It focuses on the organisation’s mission, strategy, it’s governance and management practices, financial resources, human resources, service deliveries, external relations with its stakeholders, and the overall organisational sustainability. It helps to identify causes of problems and in the decision-making to overcome them.
APPTODEV has very much specialized in conducting Organisational Capacity Assessment in different ways. We train a team for the organisation and facilitate them to conduct the assessment independently. This team can help guide a group discussion about an organization's operations. This group discussion ideally should include board members, staff, volunteers, and service recipients, but could be used as a self-assessment tool by anyone associated with a non-profit organization.
Independent Assessment
APPTODEV also assigns special expertise to conduct the assessment independent of the organisations’ management. There is also the combination of both ways that the organisation nominates employees to work with a Lead Consultant from APPTODEV, so that the assessment will be conducted as a team. The fourth form of the assessment is one where a partner or the community or a donor requests the capacity assessment of a certain organisation, so that the work will be done on certain predefined terms of references.
Whatever the method of assessment is, there is no failing or passing mark, but there are levels that each item assessed will be labelled. Under the normal seven study units to be studied, there are more than 80 items to be studied. The outcome will be shown in a tabular way, and in a graphical representation with a detailed explanation of all the factors.