What's In Your Tool Kit?

Mind Tools Newsletter 77 - 26th Jun 2007 This newsletter is published by Mind Tools Ltd of 2nd Floor, 145-157 St John Street, London, EC1V 4PY, UK. You have received it because you have subscribed to our double opt-in newsletter. To subscribe or unsubscribe, just click the links at the bottom of this email.

Contents: Bring Out Your Tool Kit! What’s New? Log Frames A Final Note

We're always on the look out for new tools and techniques that will help Mind Tools readers. And sometime I have one of those "where have you been all my life?" moments!

In my working life, before and at Mind Tools, I've worked with clients and individuals from many industries, and in many types of project. Similarly, members of the Mind Tools team come from many diverse and interesting professional backgrounds.

That's helped us build up the rich and extensive tool kit that we share with you, both on the Mind Tools site and in the Career Excellence Club

So it came as quite a surprise to discover for the first time such a great and widely applicable project management technique as today’s new tool, the Logical Framework Approach. It might be new to those of us who don't work within the International Development sector, but for those who do, it will probably be quite familiar. Read the article, and find out more about this great technique for improving the robustness and coherence of your project plans.

Bring Out Your Own Tool Kit!

Whilst great tools and ideas usually travel, some little gems remain hidden away within industries, companies or teams! We love finding these: Can you help us uncover them and share more of them What “little gem” tools and techniques do YOU use? What’s lurking in your tool-kit that just needs to be shared?

Tell us about the “little gem” tools and techniques you use. There’s a pri*ze for the best contribution, and the winner has the choice of a six month fre*e membership of the Career Excellence Club, or a US$100 gift certificate for Amazon.com.

Simply email me with:
- The name of the tool(s) or technique(s)
- Where and how do you use it or them?
- What’s really great about them?
- Your email address.

What’s New?

As well as our new Log Frames article, we have a new article on Possibilities – Unlocking Your Own Potential, a great read from regular contributor Bruna Martinuzzi.

At the Mind Tools members' area, the Career Excellence Club, we’ve been discussing a range of new resources too, from the Arthur D Little Strategy Framework, to The Art of “Being” and Dealing with Bullying in the Workplace. Click here, and find out more.

We hope you enjoy today’s article, and we look forward to hearing about your little gems – the tools and techniques you’re eager to share with us!

  

James & Rachel

James Manktelow and Rachel Thompson
MindTools.com
Mind Tools – Essential skills for an excellent career!

To find out about new tools on the Mind Tools site the moment they’re uploaded, click here to subscribe to the Mind Tools RSS feed (you'll need an RSS newsreader installed), or here to find out more about RSS.

New Article
Logframes, and the Logical Framework Approach
Planning robust, coherent, successful projects

In practice, even the best project managers can find it difficult to plan major projects without missing important activities, and without failing to spot all significant risks and issues. What's more, once you're immersed in the detail of project planning, it's hard to keep site of the big picture: What are you trying to achieve and why? What are the risks and assumptions? And how you can tell whether the project is a success once it’s implemented?

The Logical Framework Approach is a useful technique for helping you do these things, thereby making your projects more robust and coherent - and more successful.

The Logical Framework Approach (LFA) was developed in the 1970s as a tool for strategic planning, using the ideas of Management by Objectives. It's a tool of choice used by development agencies and in the international donor community. Large aid organizations throughout the world use the LFA for planning, approving, evaluating and monitoring their projects. That said, this is a powerful and useful technique, and is one that richly deserves much wider application than in international development alone.

The Logical Framework Approach and the Logframe

The Logical Framework Approach elegantly weaves together top-down and bottom-up approaches to project management. It brings together the classical, top-down, "waterfall approach" for identifying the activities in a project, with a rigorous bottom-up checking process to make sure that these activity lists are comprehensive. It then reinforces this with a rigorous risks and assumptions analysis, which is again thoroughly checked. And it concludes by identifying the controls needed to monitor and manage the project through to successful conclusion.

It does this within the framework of the Logframe Matrix, shown in Figure 1 below. This cross-references seven key areas of the project to ensure that the key questions are asked:

• Goal – why are we doing this?
  
• Purpose – what results do we expect?
  
• Outputs – what are the deliverables?
  
• Activities – what will we do to deliver the outputs?
  
• Indicators of Achievement – how will we know we’ve been successful?
  
• Means of Verification – how will we check our reported results?
  
• Risks and Assumptions – what assumptions underlie the structure of our project and what is the risk they will not prevail?

The answers to these questions are put into a Logical Framework Matrix (Logframe) and become the output of the Logical Framework Analysis exercise. The Logframe is a four by four matrix, shown below:

Figure 1: The Logframe Matrix

Logframe Matrix
Project Summary	Indicators of Achievement	Means of Verification	Important Risks and Assumptions
Goal:
Purpose:
Outputs:
Activities:

The process has significant value for any size of project. It helps identify the big picture and allows you to see how other items cascade down from it. As well, it helps flesh out the core assumptions that are used in the project development process.

Using a Logframe

Carry out the following steps in consultation with your stakeholders, after you’ve completed a thorough analysis of the situation. By involving stakeholders, you'll end up with a much more robust analysis of the project than you would on your own.

Step 1: Identifying Outputs and Activities (Project Summary, Column 1):

The first step is to brainstorm the outputs and activities required by the project, starting with the project goal. Do this in the Project Summary column (column 1) of the Logframe. Start by defining the Goal and Purpose of the project and, from these, identify the outputs and the activities required:

• Goal: What is the “to be” state of the project? What are you trying to achieve?
  
  
• Purpose: What good will you do by achieving the goal? Who are the beneficiaries? What is the underlying motivation for starting the project in the first place?
  
  
• Outputs: What specific things will be delivered as a result of this project? In order for the project to be considered a success, what changes must be made, and what will the result be?
  
  
• Activities: What will actually be done in order to deliver the intended outputs? The Logframe is not intended as an implementation guide, so this section is typically presented in bullet point form.

Tip: Don't underestimate the amount of time and work needed to complete this process properly! Manage people's expectations on this, and keep them focused on the task in hand. If people lose focus, you'll miss important activities, false assumptions, and risks.

Step 2: Verify the Vertical Logic
Next, we take a bottom-up approach to checking that this list of activities will deliver the desired results - after all, it's possible that activities have been missed, or that the actual results of these activities may not be the ones wanted. This checking process is an important part of making sure that your project plan is robust.

Column one shows a hierarchy of objectives, so it is important to check that actions identified deliver the results wanted. Check the logic in column one by using an if/then test as follows. Starting with your activities, ensure that:

• IF you complete the activity, THEN the outputs will occur.
  You want to make sure your activities and outputs are directly linked.
  
• IF your outputs are achieved, THEN the purpose of your project will be satisfied. Are the planned outputs closely tied to your purpose? Make sure the beneficiaries you identified in your purpose actually receive the beneficial outcome desired.
  
• IF your purpose is satisfied, THEN the goal of the project is achieved. Examine your purpose and goal to make sure that the purpose fully incorporates the intent within the goal.

If, in this step, you find that activities and outputs are missing or are wrong, add or adjust them appropriately. And bear in mind that if you identify issues with elements higher up in this hierarchy, you'll need to go back to Step 1 and identify appropriate outcomes and activities for those elements.

Step 3: Identify the Risks and Assumptions of your plan (Column 4)
We now cross over to the other side of the Logframe to identify risks associated with the project, and possible false assumptions that may undermine it.

There are any number of external factors that can throw projects off course. In the planning and design phase, it is prudent to identify the major assumptions you’ve used and the degree or risk associated with them.

For each of the points in the project’s structure (Column 1), identify the assumptions you're making (which may or may not be correct), and look at the associated risks.

To define your assumptions, ask “What actions or variables must exist for the project to start and proceed as planned?” Start at the bottom and work up.

• Activity Assumptions: What do you need to happen for your activities to be completed successfully? And what conditions and resources are you assuming will be in place?
  
  
• Output Assumptions: What factors outside of your control must be present to achieve the outputs you need?
  
  
• Purpose Assumptions: To achieve the purpose, what external factors do you need to have in place?
  
  
• Goal Assumptions: What are the necessary conditions for long-term viability of the project goal?
  

Clarify these assumptions with stakeholders immediately, if you can. If you can't, make sure you have early activities in place within your project plan to confirm that your assumptions are correct.

Next, repeat this process looking at risks (see our article on Risk Analysis.) Make sure you plan in all of the activities needed to manage or eliminate risk, and if risk can neither be managed or eliminated, make sure that it's clearly identified so that it can be evaluated in the next step.

Step 4: Verify the Logic of the Risks and Assumptions
Once you have identified assumptions and risks, you need to check them to determine:

• Whether your assumptions will link one level of the project to the next; and
  
• Whether risks are too large.

First of all, check that your assumptions are logical using an if/and/then analysis. Start at the bottom and work up to ensure:

• IF the activity is completed successfully, AND the assumptions underlying it are true, THEN the output will be delivered.
  
• IF the output is delivered, AND the assumptions underlying it are true, THEN the purpose will be achieved.
  
• IF the purpose is achieved, AND the assumptions underlying it are true, THEN the goal will be achieved.

Then, check some additional points related to your risk and assumption analysis:

• Make sure you have identified as many assumptions and risks as possible. Have you talked to everyone involved? Have you looked at the project from all angles?
  
  
• Make sure your assumptions are stated specifically and are not too vague. You can’t assess risk accurately if you are working with generalities.
  
  
• Do you have plans at each level to manage the risks you have identified?
  
  
• If the risks you're not able to manage are too high, consider redesigning the project or, if you still can't reduce these to sensible levels, reconsider the project's viability.

Again, where this process exposes issues with your Logframe, update it appropriately.

Step 5: Determine the Indicators of Achievement and Means of Verification
When you are satisfied with the structure of the Logframe so far, and are comfortable that you can manage the risks related to your assumptions, you can move on to think about how you will monitor progress towards success.

Performance indicators are the specific measures used to monitor this progress. Here are the criteria for a good indicator of achievement:

• Valid – it must measure the intended result.
  
  
• Reliable – the measure must be consistently attained over time.
  
  
• Sensitive – the measure should respond to changes, and should sufficiently-quickly identify if things are going wrong.
  
  
• Simple – the measure should be easy to collect or perform.
  
  
• Useful – it must help with decision making or provide information for future learning.
  
  
• Affordable – you need to be able to afford the financial and time costs involved in taking the measurement on a regular basis.

Using these criteria, for each goal, purpose, output and activity, indicate what will be used to determine whether it was successfully achieved. Also note who will be responsible for setting these targets.

Then indicate exactly how you will verify that achievement. What sources of data will you use? How will you collect the data? How often?

Make sure that appropriate activities are in place within your plan to set up and manage these monitoring systems.

Key points:

The Logical Framework Approach is a great technique for making sure that your project plan is robust and coherent. By using it, you significantly increase the likelihood that your project will be successful.

Firstly, it provides a useful framework for working through the design of your project with key stakeholders, making sure that you can take full advantage of their knowledge, insights and experience.

Secondly, it provides a useful process for testing and checking your project plan, making sure that it contains all the necessary activities, is based on sound assumptions, and fairly weighs and manages the risks inherent within the project.

Thirdly, it helps you ensure that appropriate control measures are embedded within the project, meaning that you can quickly identify where things are going wrong, and take appropriate corrective action.

The Mind Tools Store:

• The Mind Tools E-book:The main tools on the Mind Tools website in one convenient, easily-downloadable, easily-printable PDF file. We have excluded advertising to enhance clarity and have formatted sections to be easy to read, print and use. More >>
  
  
• The Career Excellence Club (The Mind Tools members' area): Make career development an every-day part of your life with member-only discussion forums, the Mind Tools Extended Toolkit (featuring many more important thinking skills), downloadable MP3-based Book Insights and Interviews, regular coaching, training, and much, much more. More >>
  

---

A Final Note From James

The Logical Framework Approach is a great technique, whatever your industry or the type of project you deal with. And I am looking forward with great anticipation to hear about other great tools and techniques you use in your industry! We'll share these with readers here in our newsletter, and at the Mind Tools site.

We’ll be back in two weeks with news of more great new resources at Mind Tools, including a feature on team effectiveness.

Have a great two weeks!

James

James Manktelow

Click here to email
Mind Tools
Essential Skills for an Excellent Career!

 

Privacy Policy:
Mind Tools will treat your email address with complete respect and will not circulate it to any third party.

 

To unsubscribe, please click the unsubscribe link at the bottom of the email we sent you.

IIf you are not already a member and you would like to subscribe, please visit the mindtools.com site and subscribe using the form on the right hand side bar.

 

© Mind Tools Ltd, 2007.
If you have enjoyed this issue, please feel free to email it on to your friends and co-workers. If you think they would benefit from the skills we teach, please pass this newsletter on!

Also, you are very welcome to post this issue of the newsletter to your own web site. If you do, you must leave it completely intact, include copyright information, and include both the URL of the mindtools site (http://www.mindtools.com) and the subscription email address for the newsletter (http://www.mindtools.com/subscribe.htm).

---

Where to go from here:

Newsletter archive

Free newsletter

Join Mind Tools