The RBM Plan!

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Results Based Management (RBM) is a fixture in international organizations and used to varying degrees by governments world wide.  For Canadian business professionals or accountants, RBM is an unfamiliar term although they may be better acquainted with RBM’esque concepts such as portfolio investment management or continuous improvement.  

Through a series of blogs, I hope to cover the following twelve RBM topic areas: 

  1. The RBM Plan! (this blog): Sort of a table of contents and my guide so I don’t miss something or repeat myself, too much. 
  2. A Brief History of RBM: A short history of RBM with a particular focus on Canada and the United Nations. 
  3. An UN-Interlude on RBM: A brief interlude to examine a United Nations efforts to implement RBM.  Central to this assessment is a RBM Framework based on five pillars corresponding to the management areas: Strategic, Operational, Accountability/Learning, Change Management & Collective Accountability.  These five areas are used to determine the maturity of RBM adoption in the UN.  
  4. What Do Organizations’ Do?: RBM is about improving organizations, but what do they ‘exactly’? More importantly, what do nonprofits and governments ‘do’? An obvious question that is important not to gloss over. After all, if you want to make organizations better, should you not understand what makes them work in the first place?
  5. Is RBM a Four Letter Word?: Central to RBM is Learning.  In order to examine and understand how to create, maintain and benefit from a RBM system, a review of what can go wrong and criticism of the methodology is a natural place to start.  
  6. Are You Ready to RBM’ble? – The System: Practical RBM is introduced in three parts, the first part describes the Organizational-System (RBM-OS).  Inspired by the United Nations RBM Framework, the RBM-OS describes the ‘big-block’ things needed for an organization to adopt, run and constantly improve on its journey to be results focused.  Limitations of the RBM-OS are discussed.  
  7. Are You Ready to RBM’ble? – The Project or Operations: The second part of an overview of RBM-OS focuses on the work done at a project or operational level.  This includes the Theory of Change, the importance of evaluation and learning to RBM, stakeholder engagement and finally, the critical role of measuring performance.  
  8. Needed to RBM’ble? – The Intangibles: Before leaving the discussion on how to create an RBM enabled organization, the intangibles needed for it to be successful.  Central to the list is organizational trust with communications a very close second.
  9. Maturing Your RBM-OS: A 1 to 5 maturity framework is proposed.  1 being a transactional focused organization and 5 being organizations that are benefiting from a Mature RBM-OS (e.g. the comprehensive arrangement of people, processes and tools used to support RBM).
  10. RBM – Level 1, the Transaction:  An overview of the investment necessary in activity management.  This includes the infrastructure, training and processes.  The activity is the ‘atomic’ level of a Mature RBM ecosystem.  Problems here will ripple through the other levels.
  11. RBM – Level 2, Operations & Project Management: Level 1 is about the Activity, administrative or programmatic.  Level 2 is about either Project or Operations Management.
    • Project Management: whether an organization seeks to have a Mature RBM Ecosystem or not, knowing how to produce, review, implement, evaluate and close projects is critical.  The Four Project Management Questions are introduced which forms the basis for subsequent RBM work. 
    • Operations management: The doppelgänger to project management is operations, programmatic or administrative management.  While a Project results in a deliverable, Operations keep the over all system running.  30/90/360 Planning and Reporting is presented as a management tool to support Level 2.
  12. RBM – Level 3, Performance, Change & RBM: Levels 1 is constantly focused on the NOW-Event or the current moment in time (+/- a day).  Level 2 is focused on the lifecycle of the project or the organization’s operations.  Level 3 brings together Change and Performance Management. It considers how an organization gets to this point through tactical tools such as budgeting, portfolio management of projects and the role of Objectives & Outcomes in these planning tools.  Level 3 considers the role of annual reporting as well. 
  13. RBM – Level 4, Governance, Strategy and Starting with the End in Mind: The previous levels assume this level’s work has been done.  Level 4 seeks to answer questions such as:
    • ‘Why does this Organization Exist?’
    • ‘How does and is this organization add value to the Market/Civil Society?’,
    • ‘How does the organization know if it is successful in its reason to exist?’
    • ‘Who gets to answer these questions… when can they change their mind… what happens if they can’t or refuse to answer?’
  14. RBM – Level 5, The Purpose and RBM: Any organization has two parts, the visible, mechanical, physical or tangible portion.  The previous four levels are mostly mechanistic; Level 5 becomes philosophical.  It starts with the Purpose/Vision of the organization but evaluates the level of trust, communication and other intangible characteristics beyond the direct control of any organization but critical for every organization’s success.  Level 5 is the secret sauce of RBM – and for a successful organization.
  15. RBM-OS – Where to Next: In the final blog, I plan to provide some concrete proposals about how to work on each of the five levels concurrently and independently.  The bad news is that the work is never done and the good news is that this means organizations can benefit from continuous improvement in their journey to become V-RBM mature.  

The focus of these blogs will be on the practical.  How can RBM help an organization and how much RBM is needed exactly to do this.  First stop, a brief history of RBM?

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