Ever wondered how to benchmark your engagement practice? Or how we systematically assess “fluffy” or “fuzzy” concepts like relationship-building processes?
I2S Research Fellow Dr Ruth O’Connor shared her latest research findings on the challenges and opportunities of a Scorecard for assessing and improving infrastructure engagement at the IAIA24 session, ‘Ensuring just transformation of infrastructure projects’.
When we asked I2S partners for which of the 10 Infrastructure Engagement Excellence (IEE) Standards they most needed a Scorecard, the resounding answer was, ‘contract development and management’. Why?
As we worked with partners to better understand their contracting processes, it became clear that the nature of a contract can set limits around engagement rollout. This includes capacity to pivot engagement when context changes and clear roles and responsibilities for the engagement team.
Contractual obligations become particularly important when the community engagement team has not been allocated a specific budget.
We also found that, despite the importance of the contract to the professionals delivering project engagement, those professionals generally have no or very limited input into the contract or knowledge of how the project delivery model was determined.
Scorecards offer one helpful way to support better oversight and involvement of the community engagement profession in the contracting phase, with important flow-on effects. In our work with government and industry partners to develop the Contract Development and Management Scorecard we found that they were looking for:
- A tool that will provide a robust, evidence-based evaluation of project performance.
- A consistent means to support understanding of the quality of engagement and how it can be improved.
- Standardised measures that provide the capacity for cross-project comparison of engagement and to track progress within an organization.
In creating the Scorecard, we looked to other sectors where these types of instruments are more common. The food industry, with its focus on fair trade and human rights in the supply chain, provides some great examples. The Chocolate Scorecard, for instance, manages to assess six very complex issues, from traceability and transparency to deforestation and climate, in a visually appealing, easy to understand scorecard.
The clarity and simplicity of a scorecard like the above is what the I2S team is now working towards. This will provide a single, colour-coded score for each of the 10 Standards and an overall summary score.
This high level communication tool will be best suited for communication and for tracking progress. Its visual appeal, like the Chocolate Scorecard, will belie the complexity below the surface. For the IEE Standards, our Contract Development and Management Scorecard integrates 16 measures that give a rigorous indication of how well-equipped a contract or contract-development process will be to support best practice community engagement.
Users who want to use the scorecard to better understand their practice and how it can be improved have the option of a detailed traffic light output for each standard. This matrix highlights areas of excellence and areas for improvement.
Our next task is to finalise a simple, traffic light design for the Contract Development and Management Scorecard and get it into practice.
Is your organisation using Scorecards or similar tools in other areas of your projects? Do you have ideas or experiences to share? We’d love to hear from you.