Designing Sustainability

As an implementation based consultancy we ensure that the changes we advised are not only achieved during our engagement, but also sustainable after our departure. Therefore sustainability takes the front row seat throughout the engagement. Sustainability needs to be designed – what do we mean by that? It needs a clear understanding of the people involved and the behaviors that need to be changed, but even more importantly it needs to marry the process and systems that have been put in place.

A typical approach is to identify a sustainability coordinator, that’s usually a good start, but it’s not sufficient. Some may identify the roles and responsibilities, and that is certainly a pre-requisite to a successful sustainability plan, but we need more than that. We need to design for sustainability. This requires a full understanding of what systems have been developed, what data needs to feed into those systems, where the data is coming from, and who is analyzing the data. Next we need to ensure that the new processes capture a way for the tools to be fully utilized, one method is to have meetings in place to review the results. A well designed plan will ensure that the sustainability coordinator reviews the weekly results of the dashboards before the meeting, questions the levers impacting the results during the meeting, and follows up with those accountable after the meeting.

Sustainability ensures that the results are continuously achieved and in order for it to be effective it needs to be started early and designed for success.

By: Poria Kanozi