Thank You for IPOOGing

The IPOOG model attempts to organize the disparate activities of a nonprofit (or any small organization) into five core activities. A ‘citizen-science’ test-drive of the time tracking element of the IPOOG leads to three conclusions. The tool can work but it relies on underlying project literacy, and it could benefit from a better user interface.

Input, Process, Output, Outcome, and Governance model support four subordinate planning tools of Event Planning, and Risk-Content-Volunteer management.

I have used project management and strategic planning to pay the bills and they have been a longstanding professional interest of mine.

A Bottom-Up Philosophy for Teaching Project Management

Since using early incarnations of Microsoft Project, I have had a problem with the starting premise of the project management ethos, ‘that complex project management methods can be scaled down to simpler projects‘.

I have never seen this worked properly and things like project management training tries to teach the student how to build the most complex things and then teaches them how to run garden variety projects by trying to eliminate extraneous complexity.

I prefer a bottom-up approach to project-literacy, ‘first, teach basic tenants and then incrementally add complexity on a need-to-learn basis‘. This learning model is also the underlying basis for Agile Project Management [1].

Additionally, through my career and volunteer work, I have noticed a general lack of knowledge of project management methodologies. You don’t need the advanced tools and knowledge taught in the scaled down model noted above, but you do need those basic tenants. For example, being able to answer the Four Project Management Questions.

IPOOG v2024 – the Story So Far

In 2023 and 2024 I pulled together some disparate planning tools into a new one called the IPOOG. The 2024 Birkie Business Model was the result which provided an overview graphic of this nonprofit and the event it ran (see gallery below for the Birkie Business Model image).

As noted in the above post, the IPOOG is a variation of a Six Sigma construct – the SIPOC (Suppliers, Inputs, Process, Output, and Customers). IPOOG is used instead because not every nonprofit has a customer, but everyone has an outcome.

Five Part IPOOG – A Refresher

The IPOOG Model is broken into five parts. At the top level is the aforementioned graphic. It provides an overview of the organization. In a single snapshot, the organization’s Input, Process, Output, Outcome, and Governance functions.

Below the graphic, and integrated into it, are four core activities. To a greater or lesser extent, these are fleshed out in other blogs:

Planning: How an organization prioritizes what is important and organizes its Time, Talent, and Treasure to achieve these priorities.
Risk Management: The people, processes, and technologies to enable opportunities and mitigate risk. See the further reading section below on this topic.
Content and Process Management: Organizations in general and nonprofits in particular are constantly challenged in documenting their business processes. See the further reading section below for some thoughts on why Documentation is a Waste of Time and how to make it value add.
Volunteer & Staff Management: How to attract, retain, and manage the human resources needed by a nonprofit.
- This Core activity is also where staff and volunteer time Tracking Comes in, the subject of ‘citizen-science’ project discussed below.

Organizations are welcome to tweak these five parts – but I cannot think of a nonprofit whose service delivery would not fit into the above. Still, the tool must resonate with the organization’s leadership, volunteers, and funders – so change away!

Beyond the Birkie

The Birkie was a good initial use-case for the IPOOG tool. The question is whether it is unique to this organization or could other nonprofits and organizations use the methodology. To this end, a ‘citizen-science’ activity was run in late 2024.

The Impetus for the Citizen-Science Project

Organizations run on ‘Time, Talent, and Treasure’. Volunteers contribute the first two. A volunteer hour is a highly perishable gift that must be managed properly. To keep the hours flowing the nonprofit must constantly reduce the ‘The Burden of Volunteering‘.

Unfortunately, at the same time, the organization needs to know how much time it took to do an activity and what type of skills are needed. Beyond internal planning reasons, grant reporting often demands this information.

Finally, the stalwart volunteer will eventually need to be replaced. Like staff members, volunteers are only passing through [2]. One of the first questions the new volunteer will ask is ‘what is the time commitment’. Not knowing is bad, under-estimating is worse.

Knowing what your volunteers worked on and for how long is good information – but how to best collect it?

Three Citizen-Science Questions to be Answered

How to collect volunteer hours is being examined through two means. Firstly, I committed to track my volunteer efforts for at least five months of 2024 (see Tracking IPOOG Time and Three Months of IPOOG’ing as well as a future blog). A more formal citizen-science project involved three volunteers and three research questions:

Can organizations and individuals benefit from systematically tracking time?
How can the process of time tracking be automated to be as non-intrusive as possible?
What are the benefits/concerns of tracking time in such a manner?

The intention was to have three individuals use the tool for very different volunteer activities. One individual bowed out early, another did not use the tool but did participate, and a third is using IPOOG to plan for an international cycling trip.