Read time: 2.43 mins
What Is Adaptive Programme Management? Find Out With UCT
The business landscape changes continually as new opportunities emerge and new information comes to light. An environment of constant uncertainty requires an adaptive approach to programme management, which involves readjusting at each stage of the programme life cycle.
Watch Sarah Chapman, Course Convenor on the Programme Management: A Monitoring and Evaluation Approach online short course from UCT, discuss how to remedy the challenges faced by programme managers.
Transcript
In the world we work in, programmes are designed to improve the conditions in which they operate. But as anyone who has worked in managing programmes know, many problems resist efforts to remedy them.
How many of us can relate to contexts where the environment is characterized by uncertainty, as you interact with stakeholders and collaborators, new opportunities for influence emerge that take your programme in directions you might never have originally anticipated. An effective programme manager needs to be continually asking the question, what is developing now and how can I as a manager now adapt my programme design, monitoring, implementation, and costing to ensure I keep managing for impact?
Adaptive management is an intentional and systematic decision-making process that allows you as the programme manager to improve your decision-making by learning from emerging information and adapting to changes in context. The adaptive management approach follows the programme life cycle. Let us see how this approach can be implemented using an example. The first step is to define the problem that the programme intends to address. For example, perhaps a community has noticed an increase in drug abuse by teenagers, and your programme has been asked to address this problem.
Once a problem is defined, you identify the goals and objectives of the programme that seek to address this problem. Step three is to formulate the evaluation criteria against which you will assess the performance of the programme. The next step in the approach is to select the actions and resources needed to design and implement the actions. Step six requires a monitoring plan of the implementation action to be developed. In the evaluation phase of the programme life cycle, the programme manager will analyse and evaluate the programme findings, communicate the current understanding of the programme to stakeholders and use the new information to make appropriate decisions to adapt the programme.