Sylvia's Journal

Our requests for work permits are being processed. So is my request to leave the country for our quarterly R&R, sometime in early January.

While this is being done I returned to my tasks. One of those is to review our activity plan with a view to risk management: identifying where the risks are (of not producing deliverables, of not being prepared for eventualities, of losing people and things, etc.).

It is a good practice introduced by one of my Australian colleagues. I am seeing the advantage of having other nationalities (than those of our host country) on our staff – we are drawing from a much wider reservoir of knowledge instead of recycling our own (American) bathwater.

As the days tick away toward the last day of the project (a little more than 200 days) the competition for timeslots for workshops, study tours, training is becoming more intense. Sometimes different units are targeting the same people, and of course the higher you go in the hierarchy the smaller the pool. Since my focus is senior leadership development I am feeling the squeeze especially hard.

Training activities are tangible and highly desirable if you want to keep up spending rates and have evidence that you are busy implementing your plan, on target, on time. But some of our work plan activities are not so distinct.

In two of my teams work plan activities are of the coaching type, routine and ongoing capacity development that takes place in the workplace – these are the ones hard to connect to results; and if the object of the coaching is not interested (or too busy) it leaves us stranded with our plans.

In contrast, a third team is responsible for ordering, shipping, clearing and distributing millions of dollars of pharmaceutical products to the health facilities in about one third of Afghanistan’s provinces. Compared to the coaching the intended outcome is clear cut and tangible. Not that it is easier (getting things transported here, clearing customs and preventing loss and leakage is no mean task in this part of the world) but when all is said and done at least you can see results for all the efforts: pharmacies being stocked and doling out pills to patients.