Collaborative Practice Tool
Introducing 10to19’s Collaborative Practice Tool, a guide to support reviews, self-reflection and learning to continually identify effective, innovative, scalable and sustainable promising practices through a project’s lifecycle
Snapshot of the Tool
Below is a summary of the 5 steps that a project team can follow to arrive at Promising Practices for their program – each step in this process will enable the team to gain a holistic picture of the program while narrowing down to solutions that work
Instructions to follow before using the tool
Assigning Roles
The tool is effective when implemented collectively within teams with people playing complementary roles. Therefore, before beginning, choose the following members and clarify their roles.
This group of specialists would be referred to as ‘the team’
Enquiry Specialist
This can be someone who asks guiding questions to arrive at the promising practices and assesses the potential for scale, however, is not necessarily involved in the day-to-day implementation of the program. For example, this could include roles similar to that of a vertical lead or overall project manager.
Program Specialist
This can be an individual from the program team who delivers the program on-ground on a day-to-day basis and understands the program from its inception to the present day. For example, this could be someone like an implementation coordinator or on-ground volunteer. We recommend that you have more than one program specialist present while implementing the roadmap.
Impact Specialist
This is someone who has a good understanding of learning and impact in general, especially qualitative impact. The person must also have a good understanding of the scaling ecosystem within the development sector in India. This can include a keen understanding of government policies, programs and schemes, and the needs of the practitioner and philanthropic sector. Such roles are usually carried out by senior/mid-level management in leadership positions.
documentation Specialist
This must be someone who uses the tool to document the discussion and promising practices. Such a role usually requires someone with strong organising and typing skills, good command over the English language and who pays attention to detail.
Each step contains ‘instructions’, along with ‘probing questions’ for facilitation. The team does not need to answer all the probing questions. This is left to the discretion of the enquiry specialist.
The roadmap focuses on certain aspects of the program or initiative but is not an exercise to re-calibrate the theory of change or strategies
The goal of this tool is to capture the on-ground strategies, solutions, frameworks, aspects, methodologies, and ways of working in a program that should be gathered for knowledge-sharing among actors in the sector.
The objectives are specified by the enquiry specialist at the start of each step.
All activities and approaches are probed for by the program specialist using the probing questions
Responses are captured by the documentation specialist and summarised by the enquiry specialist at the end of each step using the documentation template
- Documentation specialist should keep a notebook/word document for recording key points during discussions facilitated by the enquiry specialist. This will later aid in accurately documenting information in the documentation templates.
Below is a fully constructed example, provided to act as a reference for how the relevant details would be captured in each table through the tool.