In response to my Mother's accusation that the previous explanation of my job with BRIF was written, and I quote, in "consultant speak", I've tried to write something simpler.You will find below my own personal description of what my work involves and covers. Click here for the placement’s initial content and general objectives, as defined by VSO Bangladesh and BRIF management. The details below are the most current and will be updated as things evolve.

My title was "Organisational Development Advisor". So I was an advisor or a consultant, someone who suggests, shows and/or teaches new ways of doing or seeing things. I worked with others to identify and understand what needs to be improved, then helped them to find solutions and implement them. The fine line I walked in doing all this was between merely telling people what I think they should be doing or thinking, and doing it for them. It is often very tempting to want to do everything yourself, as you think it'll be easier or quicker or better. However, if you want to make a lasting difference to the organisation and its people, you need to transfer your skills and knowledge to others and let them do the work themselves. You support them as they learn, and hopefully at the end of it all they will be equipped to solve their own problems when you're gone.

Hopefully that's enough for my role, but what did I advise about? In Development circles, and possibly elsewhere, they use terms like "organisational development" or "organisational capacity". All this really means is looking at how able an organisation is to reach the objectives it's set itself (it's capacity), and what it can change to improve that ability (development). It is often difficult for a person to see himself/herself as others see him/her, so outside advice from family and friends can be very valuable. The same is true for an organisation, and consultants are often brought in by senior management to have a fresh set of eyes look at the situation and offer their opinion.

The sorts of things I looked at were normal business processes (HR, purchasing, accounts, marketing etc.) but also other more generic areas like decision-making (who, how, based on what, when etc.), skills (e.g. what do we have vs. what do we need), behaviour and culture. I also looked at the organisation's strategic plan (vision, mission, objectives today and tomorrow), project and/or activity management, even coaching 1 or more managers on certain weaknesses (technical or personal) they have.

In the case of BRIF I started with a blank sheet of paper. In other words, I wasn't given a detailed brief (no pun untended) specifying what to concentrate on from the start. Personally this made my placement more interesting as I had to get a feel for everything that was going on before suggesting a few priorities to focus on, at least initially. As a result, my first few months were spent understanding who does what, how the organisation is structured, how it came to where it is and where it now wants to go, what the culture is and how people feel about working here. Concretely I organised 2 workshops, the 1st for senior management, the 2nd for project management staff and below, during which the participants defined and shared what they see as being the organisation's current problems. From this input I then tried to develop a bigger picture of what's happening before taking each group of issues and delving deeper to get more facts and understanding. This is the sort of work I love - finding links and patterns between different pieces of information and making sense of it all in a neat diagram.

Only when we had greater depth and a solid basis on which to base our opinions did we then start talking about answers and implementing them to make things better. Next, we designed projects to solve the priority problems the organisation itself had chosen. This should have included identifying and allocating the resources required and appointing someone to be in charge and start working, but in reality the only resource was me and anything that I wasn't personally driving forward didn't get anywhere. Here again my role was one of facilitating and accompanying the work of others, not managing the change projects myself. In addition, I needed to train up several middle managers on how to effectively facilitate some of the workshops / training courses I ran as in all honesty my grasp of Bangla was not sufficient to communicate the ideas and feelings required to get things moving and keep them on track. If I refer back to my view of what an advisor should do this I trust will turn out to be a blessing in disguise!

So what then did I actually achieve at BRIF? Well, as I described in my final VSO report: