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The overall purpose of the ICCO Partners Project is:
To strengthen the organisational capacity and management of the ICCO partner organisations in order to strengthen their ability to deliver programmes that achieve positive impact.

The project is working to build the organisational capacity of ICCO partners in two main areas: Financial Management (FM) and Development Management (DM), within which there is focus on a range of specific subjects and sub-subjects based on the specific needs of each partner.
The project objectives are:

The NGO partners have the capacity to manage and report on their finances in a sound and consistent manner, which both helps them manage their activities more effectively and fulfils external requirements for good practice standards.
The NGO partners have strengthened their organisational capacity and management in line with their own assessment of needs in areas agreed with ICCO and VBNK at the start of the project.

History
ICCO approached VBNK in late 2004 to start discussing ideas for building the capacity of their Cambodian partner organisations. They had come to the conclusion that the somewhat ad hoc approach they had previously taken to supporting organisational and staff development was not working very effectively and they wanted to explore ways of making capacity building activities more purposeful and effective. Our discussions led to an agreement to begin a project, which is known as the ICCO Partners Project – IPP.
Phase I of the project was implemented between June 2005 and February 2006. The main activities were about financial management, working together with 10 partners. In addition, there was assessment of organisational capacities and the results of this assessment formed the basis for planning Phase II.
Phase II began in March 2006 and will end March 2008. 18 NGO Cambodian partners of ICCO decided to participate in this project, 16 of whom participate in both strands (FM and DM), and 2 partners only in the FM strand.

The IPP Course of Action
We learned from Phase I about how to design an effective course of action, which begins with assessment.

Conduct organisational assessment (OA) in order to identify partners’ needs that will be addressed during the learning relationship with the project.
Organise an initial meeting with all partners involved to present the result of the organisational assessment, clarify the project purpose, expectations of ICCO, VBNK and partners, and define a common Terms of Agreement between the individual partners and VBNK.
Conduct an orientation session with individual partners to further clarify the project purpose, roles and responsibilities in their learning relationship with the IPP team. Explain and clarify learning areas including learning objectives, indicators for change, learning approaches, work plan, and schedule.
Negotiate with individual partners and finalise the “Learning Agreement”, which indicates the subject areas, objectives and indicators for change, work plan, and schedule.

Design and provide interventions on the subject areas based on the priorities of the partners considering their specific needs as identified in their individual organisational assessment report.

Conduct follow up/ review sessions for partners to:

reflect on what they have learned so far,
explore successes and issues/challenges that emerged from their learning,
discuss outcomes/changes (individual and organizational levels) that resulted from the learning relationships with the IPP team, and
monitor and assess the achievements of objectives against the indicators, and set the priorities for the next period.

The IPP Methodology
Most of the interventions are conducted at the partners’ office so that partners learn about specific subjects based on their specific needs. In addition, we organise plenary sessions every six months, and some other workshops/fora, for all partners to come together to share their experience and practice in order to learn from each other.

The methodology to facilitate partners’ learning is Coaching, complemented by Training and Facilitation as required. In IPP, we have a working definition for each of the methodologies as follows:

Coaching: IPP coaching is a process of supporting partners to learn to improve individual or group performance. It requires various activities depending on the levels of partners’ knowledge and experience on the subject under consideration:

Giving guidance for specific skills/ performance

Giving advice, comments (including sharing experience)

Motivating partners / unlocking partners’ potentials

Training is a process to ensure that participants achieve their best learning in order to accomplish the learning objectives set by the trainer (based on partner’s needs).Training is more input and content oriented, which helps partners to fill their knowledge gaps.
Facilitation is a process to ensure that participants achieve their best thinking in order to accomplish their own objectives. Facilitation is more process oriented, which helps partners to work to produce specific expected results.

We incorporate the Action Learning Cycle (Action, Reflection, Learning, Planning or ARLP) into our processes and activities as this is a very effective tool to guide participants to draw their experience and learning from their practice.

The IPP Intervention Process
Based on the agreement with the partner on the priority order of interventions, we begin the process for each intervention by analyzing and understanding the specific needs and issues, assessing the existing knowledge and experience of the partner, and helping the partner to get in-depth understanding on the subject context (some training might be provided at this stage).
After reviewing the context of the intervention and summarising the current situation, the process continues through four stages.
1. Partner and IPP Team agree on what the partner will do as next assignment.
2. Partner does the assignment.
3. Partner produces a draft result from their assignment and submits to IPP team.
4. Partner finalises the output.

In each stage there are several opportunities for the partner to receive coaching support and guidance from IPP team members (through meetings and e-mail). It is not the task of the IPP Facilitator to produce an output (e.g. a strategic plan, a proposal, report etc.) for partners, our role is to support partners to produce the agreed outputs by guiding them through a learning process. Through applying this process partners can learn how to achieve their own result from that learning, which includes increased confidence. It is not in our approach to focus on getting things done quickly (e.g. helping partners to produce a strategic plan in one week) as we believe that partners will not learn much that way.

The IPP Team
The project is being implemented by a team of 9 full time VBNK staff, which includes 2 Facilitators for the Financial Management strand, and 5 Facilitators for the Development Management strand, a Project Manager, and a Project Assistant. In addition to the full time staff, the project has part time technical support from a Technical Advisor and the VBNK Director.

It is expected that there will be a Phase III which is intended as a review and consolidation period.

ICCO Partner Project (IPP)