OBJECTIVE
A Mumbai-based non-government organisation operates the world’s largest 24-hour toll free emergency phone service for children in distress. Currently its reach is spread across 420 districts in India. The NGO wants to restructure itself internally and establish better processes and systems to scale their programmes to 710 districts in India. Sattva played a role in helping redesign the organisation across three broad elements: structure, people and processes.
SATTVA’S APPROACH
To enable the NGO, we first had to identify key capabilities essential to deliver its mission and diagnose current strengths and gaps across these areas. This was all through the lens of ensuring future priorities and scale. We then designed the new organisation across three elements of structure, people and processes. Finally, we defined the step-by-step transition plan required to build the new organisation along with possible risks and mitigation measures. Simultaneously, a detailed resource mobilisation plan was created, defining donor segments most relevant to the NGO, product positioning and other recommendations.
The major recommendations to organisational structure included creating new departments such as human resources, and strengthening existing departments, along with a physical decentralisation to ensure ground teams are closer to field. The physical decentralisation essentially retained their existing regional centres as ‘hubs’ while instituting state level offices as ‘spokes’, further deepening their presence on-the-ground and ability to cultivate relationships with important stakeholders. On the people front an HR department was recommended to ensure the organisation remains employee-centric, redefined role descriptions as required and ensure it attracts, retains and develops top talent within.
Major recommendations surrounding processes were to ensure the organisation becomes more systems-driven and not dependent on any one person. This included a performance management rhythm system to ensure relevant individuals were speaking at required frequency, and identifying key SOPs to ensure standardised operations across the country. All recommendations were made to ensure the organisation is better able to scale across the country in a seamless manner.
KEY LEARNINGS
The Sattva Consulting team engaged with stakeholders including the governing board, senior leadership, field teams and partners on-the-ground in order to get a full understanding of the organisation. Being an NGO working with the Government of India was another layer of complexity which brought about many opportunities along with challenges. A deeper understanding of district complexity in regards to geography, population and child-related issues was garnered in order to project the number of partners and associated people count, followed by budgetary requirements. Sattva Consulting will now support the organisation throughout the transition plan, and drive the change management within the organisation, with the intention of enabling them to deepen their presence and create child friendly environments across every district in India.
HIGHLIGHTS
● New department structures included monitoring & evaluation, partner management unit, human resources and technology & systems.
● Strengthened departments included research & advocacy, finance and fundraising.
● New organisational model included: 5 regional centres and 22 state level offices
● Empowered regional centers to ensure decentralised operations.
● Recommendations regarding a vice chairman for a tenure of 3-5 years, to ensure continuity across board chairmanship
● Expected growth in three years: 72% increase in districts coverage.