Operational challenges of engaging development partners in district health planning in Tanzania

BACKGROUND: Development Assistance for Health (DAH) represents an important source of health financing in many low and middle-income countries. However, there are few accounts on how priorities funded through DAH are integrated with district health priorities. This study is aimed at understanding the operational challenges of engaging development partners in district health planning in Tanzania. METHODS: This explanatory mixed-methods study was conducted in Kinondoni and Bahi districts, representing urban and rural settings of the country. Data collection took place between November and December 2015. The quantitative tools (mapping checklist, district questionnaire and Development partners (DPs) questionnaire) mapped the DPs and their activities and gauged the strength of DP engagement in district health planning. The qualitative tool, a semi-structured in-depth interview guide administered to 20 key informants (the council health planning team members and the development partners) explained the barriers and facilitators of engagement. Descriptive and thematic analysis was utilized for quantitative and qualitative data analysis respectively. RESULTS: Eighty-six per cent (85%) of the development partners delivering aid in the studied districts were Non-Governmental Organizations. Twenty percent (20%) of the interventions were HIV/AIDS interventions. We found that only four (4) representing 25 % (25%) DPs had an MOU with the District Council, 56 % (56%) had submitted their plans in writing to be integrated into the 2014/15 CCHP. Six (6) representing 38 % (38%) respondents had received at least one document (guidelines, policies and other planning tools) from the district for them to use in developing their organization activity plans. Eighty-seven point 5 % (87.5%) from Bahi had partial or substantial participation, in the planning process while sixty-two point 5 % (62.5%) from Kinondoni had not participated at all (zero participation). The operational challenges to engagements included differences in planning cycles between the government and donors, uncertainties in funding from the prime donors, lack of transparency, limited skills of district planning teams, technical practicalities on planning tools and processes, inadequate knowledge on planning guidelines among DPs and, poor donor coordination at the district level. CONCLUSIONS: We found low engagement of Development Partners in planning. To be resolved are operational challenges related to differences in planning cycles, articulations and communication of local priorities, donor coordination, and technical skills on planning and stakeholder engagement

The role of learning on industrial simulation design and analysis

The capability of modeling real-world system operations has turned simulation into an indispensable problemsolving methodology for business system design and analysis. Today, simulation supports decisions ranging from sourcing to operations to finance, starting at the strategic level and proceeding towards tactical and operational levels of decision-making. In such a dynamic setting, the practice of simulation goes beyond being a static problem-solving exercise and requires integration with learning. This article discusses the role of learning in simulation design and analysis motivated by the needs of industrial problems and describes how selected tools of statistical learning can be utilized for this purpose

Long-term planning and development for urban and regional inclusion, safety, resilience, and sustainability. Insights from Singapore

Today, Singapore is a thriving city-state representing a growth of almost eighty percent since 1990. A feasible combination of state authorities’ planning, policy implementation, public-private partnerships, and international assistance has led to the city-state’s development and sustainability. Urban economics fl uctuations, demographic shifts, environment degradation reaching to irreversible points, among others, are expected to challenge the future of cities the next 50 years. Thus, it is considered essential to plan ahead for sustainability and resource management. This study delves into the broad policies and practices that have contributed to Singapore’s success story while also getting into recent years’ specifi cs and modern technologies of sustainable planning and development. Adopting a case study of Singapore long-term, or constant, re-development, fi ndings contribute to the enhancement of the existing body of knowledge in the fi eld of sustainable planning and can benefi t those interested in understanding from a policy and operational standpoint. The Singapore example illustrates that technocratic competence in design, planning, and implementation is a fundamental requirement for the long-term world-wide sustainability scheme expressed by the UN Sustainable Development Goals

US/UK Mental Models of Planning: The Relationship Between Plan Detail and Plan Quality

This paper presents the results of a research study applying a new cultural analysis method to capture commonalities and differences between US and UK mental models of operational planning. The results demonstrate the existence of fundamental differences between the way US and UK planners think about what it means to have a high quality plan. Specifically, the present study captures differences in how US and UK planners conceptualize plan quality. Explicit models of cultural differences in conceptions of plan quality are useful for establishing performance metrics for multinational planning teams. This paper discusses the prospects of enabling automatic evaluation of multinational team performance by combining recent advances in cultural modelling with enhanced ontology languages

What is a Good Plan? Cultural Variations in Expert Planners’ Concepts of Plan Quality

This article presents the results of a field research study examining commonalities and differences between American and British operational planners’ mental models of planning. We conducted Cultural Network Analysis (CNA) interviews with 14 experienced operational planners in the US and UK. Our results demonstrate the existence of fundamental differences between the way American and British expert planners conceive of a high quality plan. Our results revealed that the American planners’ model focused on specification of action to achieve synchronization, providing little autonomy at the level of execution, and included the belief that increasing contingencies reduces risk. The British planners’ model stressed the internal coherence of the plan, to support shared situational awareness and thereby flexibility at the level of execution. The British model also emphasized the belief that reducing the number of assumptions decreases risk. Overall, the American ideal plan serves a controlling function, whereas the British ideal plan supports an enabling function. Interestingly, both the US and UK would view the other’s ideal plan as riskier than their own. The implications of cultural models of plans and planning are described for establishing performance measures and designing systems to support multinational planning teams

Evaluation based on critical systems heuristics

Introduction: Critical systems heuristics (CSH) draws on the substantive work and philosophy of C. West Churchman, a systems engineer who, along with Russell Ackoff during the 1950s and 1960s, defined operations research in the United States. Churchman later pioneered developments in the 1970s of what is now known as 'soft' and 'critical' systemic thinking and practice in the domain of social or human activity systems. Churchman died in 2004. His legacy lies in signalling the importance of being alert to value-laden boundary judgements when making evaluations. Boundaries are what we socially construct in designing and evaluating any human activity system of interest (e.g., any situation of concern from a kinship group, an organisation, or a larger entity such as a national health system). The primary boundary of any human activity systems is defined by 'purpose'. Churchman's work is characterised by a continual ethical commitment to the overarching purpose of improved human well-being. In order to fulfil such purposeful activity, there is always a need to broaden inquiry from the particular system of focus so as to appreciate what Churchman calls the total relevant system. The effectiveness and efficiency of a system of interest depends on the actual boundary judgements associated with that system of interest. Churchman first identified 9 conditions or categories (including the category 'purpose�) associated with any purposeful system of interest in his book The Design of Inquiring Systems [1, 2]. He later extended these to 12 categories in a book provocatively entitled The Systems Approach and Its Enemies, significantly taking into account 3 extra factors (�enemies�) that lie outside the actual system of interest but which can be affected by, and therein have an effect on, the performance of the system [1, 2]. In the early 1980s a doctorate student of Churchman from Switzerland, Werner Ulrich, translated Churchman's 12 categories into an operational set of 12 questions which he called critical systems heuristics [3]. Ulrich returned to Switzerland and worked with CSH as a public health and social welfare policy analyst and program evaluator [4]. Section 2 introduces the basic toolbox of CSH, along with suggestions on when to use it and the benefits of its use. Section 3 will guide you through a suggested operational use of CSH questions in a process of evaluation. Section 4 provides a summary of an extensive case study in which CSH was used for evaluating the role of public participation in natural resource-use planning. Section 5 provides some advice for the practitioner in developing skills on using CSH for evaluation

Orchestrating the spatial planning process: from Business Process Management to 2nd generation Planning Support Systems

Metaplanning can be considered as a necessary step for improving collaboration, transparency and accountability in sustainable and democratic spatial decision-making process. This paper reports current findings on the operational implementation of the metaplanning concept developed by the authors relying on Business Process Management methods and techniques. Two solutions are presented which implement spatial planning process workflows thanks to the development of original spatial data and processing services connectors to a Business Process Management suite. These results can be considered as a first step towards the development of 2nd generation Planning Support Systems

Models for Learning (Mod4L) Final Report: Representing Learning Designs

The Mod4L Models of Practice project is part of the JISC-funded Design for Learning Programme. It ran from 1 May – 31 December 2006. The philosophy underlying the project was that a general split is evident in the e-learning community between development of e-learning tools, services and standards, and research into how teachers can use these most effectively, and is impeding uptake of new tools and methods by teachers. To help overcome this barrier and bridge the gap, a need is felt for practitioner-focused resources which describe a range of learning designs and offer guidance on how these may be chosen and applied, how they can support effective practice in design for learning, and how they can support the development of effective tools, standards and systems with a learning design capability (see, for example, Griffiths and Blat 2005, JISC 2006). Practice models, it was suggested, were such a resource. The aim of the project was to: develop a range of practice models that could be used by practitioners in real life contexts and have a high impact on improving teaching and learning practice. We worked with two definitions of practice models. Practice models are: 1. generic approaches to the structuring and orchestration of learning activities. They express elements of pedagogic principle and allow practitioners to make informed choices (JISC 2006) However, however effective a learning design may be, it can only be shared with others through a representation. The issue of representation of learning designs is, then, central to the concept of sharing and reuse at the heart of JISC’s Design for Learning programme. Thus practice models should be both representations of effective practice, and effective representations of practice. Hence we arrived at the project working definition of practice models as: 2. Common, but decontextualised, learning designs that are represented in a way that is usable by practitioners (teachers, managers, etc).(Mod4L working definition, Falconer & Littlejohn 2006). A learning design is defined as the outcome of the process of designing, planning and orchestrating learning activities as part of a learning session or programme (JISC 2006). Practice models have many potential uses: they describe a range of learning designs that are found to be effective, and offer guidance on their use; they support sharing, reuse and adaptation of learning designs by teachers, and also the development of tools, standards and systems for planning, editing and running the designs. The project took a practitioner-centred approach, working in close collaboration with a focus group of 12 teachers recruited across a range of disciplines and from both FE and HE. Focus group members are listed in Appendix 1. Information was gathered from the focus group through two face to face workshops, and through their contributions to discussions on the project wiki. This was supplemented by an activity at a JISC pedagogy experts meeting in October 2006, and a part workshop at ALT-C in September 2006. The project interim report of August 2006 contained the outcomes of the first workshop (Falconer and Littlejohn, 2006). The current report refines the discussion of issues of representing learning designs for sharing and reuse evidenced in the interim report and highlights problems with the concept of practice models (section 2), characterises the requirements teachers have of effective representations (section 3), evaluates a number of types of representation against these requirements (section 4), explores the more technically focused role of sequencing representations and controlled vocabularies (sections 5 & 6), documents some generic learning designs (section 8.2) and suggests ways forward for bridging the gap between teachers and developers (section 2.6). All quotations are taken from the Mod4L wiki unless otherwise stated