Worksheet4 Initial feasibility
Initial feasibility | 4.1
The previous meeting of the Core Group will have identified who is going to lead on investigating in more detail each of the ideas it has decided to explore. This worksheet provides some suggestions about how they might go about doing this.
What is the problem?
The brief you have been given by the Core Group will probably need to be teased out in more detail. This may involve going back to the other members of the Core Group to get a more specific idea of how they see the problem. It may also be that you need to talk to other people within the organisations that make up the cluster.
For example, if all of the cluster members use volunteers and it has been decided to work together to improve arrangements for volunteer support, you would need to understand:
- what role volunteers play within each organisation, and what skills they need to carry it out;
- where they come from and how they are recruited – for example, are they members of the local community who come through the local volunteer bureau, or service users who are being involved in the work of the organisation as a means of helping them into work?;
- what the current arrangements are for training, supporting and supervising them.
Someone within each organisation will be responsible for this aspect of its work, and these are the people you need to talk to. If possible, get them together for a meeting – this sort of group discussion can not only help you to scope out the nature of the problems with the current arrangements, but also provide some fruitful ideas on possible ways of tackling them.
The same applies to other infrastructure functions such as HR and ICT support. Someone within each organisation will be covering these areas – often on a multi-tasking basis, and often struggling to balance them with a number of other competing tasks; they are your best source of information.
What are the options?
As you build up a picture of the nature of the problem, a number of possible solutions will probably emerge. For example, if the generic problem is a need to improve standards of HR support, possible approaches might include:
- setting up a support network for the people in each organisation who hold down the HR function;
- earmarking a small amount of each organisation’s training budget and pooling the resources to fund a series of specialist training events for them;
- shopping around for the best deal from commercial insurance-based personnel support services; and,
- trying to negotiate a group contract with a specialist provider of HR support.
What are the resource implications?
The ideas on the list will almost certainly require different levels of resource. Some may be possible simply by making more effective use of existing budgets, others may have an additional financial cost which would be affordable if shared between the members of the cluster but not for any one individual organisation. Others may have no financial cost, but require admin support to keep them going – for example, organising a support network and periodic meetings between part-time volunteer coordinators or HR specialists.
It is important to go back to the data from the purchasing survey (see Worksheet 3) to look at what resources are already being committed and how they are being used. A lot of the areas with potential for resource sharing, such as IT support, HR insurance services and training will already have budgets – who is paying how much for what? is there anything there that can be built on or used more creatively? There may be potential sources of resource from outside that need to be investigated; the following section suggests some ideas.
Pulling it together
Once you have got a picture of what the nature of the problem is, what approaches might be possible, and what resources would be required/available, you are in a position to put together a brief initial feasibility report which sets out:
- what might be achievable and what problem it would address;
- what input it would require from the cluster’s members;
- who would need to do what, both in terms of one-off input and in terms of longer term support/management;
- how long it would take;
- why (or whether) it would be worth it.
If there is more than one option, the report would need to cover these areas for each.