In my experience, designing and implementing effective capacity building initiatives should always give adequate consideration to the following three steps:
There are usually four questions that should be addressed when considering the possibility of a capacity building initiative:
1. Should We Invest In Capacity Building?
2. Are We Ready For Capacity Building?
3. Do We Need Help From Outside?
4. How Do We Get Started?
When planning capacity building interventions one needs to determine what to focus on from a plethora of possible things to observe. My assumption is that groups and organisations always have three fundamental issues to deal with:
1. how to manage their boundaries, (i.e. determining who is in and who is out);
2. how to survive in their external environment by fulfilling their main functions or tasks; and
3. how to manage their internal interpersonal relationships.
Each of these issues can be observed on three levels:
1. the content which the group or organisation works on;
2. the processes it uses to go about its business; and
3. the structure it has in place
These three levels combined with the three issues described condition the most appropriate focus for intervening in the particular situation, and allow us to determine when to shift from e.g. content to process.
Anything we do is an intervention. There is no such thing as pure diagnosis. This step thus overlaps with the previous ones. After having a better idea of what is going on in your organisation we department, we can look at designing more meaningful interventions. This step involves tailor making standard organisational development methods to the specific circumstances of your department or organisation.