Guide for Documenting and Sharing Best Practices 1

Outline of the presentation � Introduction � What is Best Practice? � Examples of Best Practice � Where do best practice comes from? � Procedures for identifying and documenting best practices � Disseminating and sharing best practices 2

WHAT IS BEST PRACTICE? 3

What is Best Practice Definition: A best practice is commonly defined as a technique or methodology that, through experience or research , has proven reliably to lead to a desired result. The term is used frequently in areas such as health, government administration, education, project management, and others. 4

What is Indigenous Knowledge? Indigenous Knowledge �It is the knowledge that people in a given community have developed over time, and continue to develop: - Based on experience - often tested over centuries of use - dynamic and changing 5

Examples of Indigenous Knowledge Examples could be: �Traditional treatment of animals and human beings using medicinal herbs and plants �Use of seeds of Parthenium (congress weed) to prevent coagulation of milk in Somali region �Closure of range land from stock for certain period of time to allow regeneration of ‘extinct‘ grasses �Traditional methods used for controlling of alien species invading the productive range lands �Preservation of traditional mutual self-help mechanisms within communities 6

Best practice… �In the context of PCDP, a practical definition of Best practice is Knowledge about what works in specific situations and contexts , with out using inordinate resources to achieve the desired results, and �which can be used to develop and implement solutions adapted to similar pastoralists problems in other situations and contexts. 7

Best Practice… �The use of the word best shouldn't be considered in the superlative sense. In other words the word best is not in about perfection. Results can be partial and may be related to only one or more components of the practice being considered. �In deed documenting and applying lessons learned on what does not work and why it doesn’t work is an integral part of best practice so that the same types of mistakes can be avoided by other programs and projects. 8

WHAT IS THE RATIONALE FOR DOCUMENTING AND SHARING BEST PRACTICE? 9

Rationale for documenting… �to learn from others and to re-use knowledge �identify and replace poor practices �raise the performance of poor performers closer to that of the best �avoid reinventing the wheel �minimize re-work caused by use of poor methods �save costs through better productivity and efficiency �improve services to beneficiaries. 10

Best practice… �There are several creative and constructive actions by people and organizations in the pastoral areas to improve the livelihood of pastoralists. Making knowledge of such actions widely available may prevent the repetition of mistakes and loss of valuable time. �Thus, the main rationale for documenting and sharing Best practices is to enable persons and organizations working in pastoral areas to avoid re -inventing the wheel to learn in order to improve performance and to avoid mistakes of others. 11

Approaches to identifying and sharing best practice �Identify users’ requirements Look at what areas of the organization need attention because of poor performance or difficult challenges. Who can most benefit from better knowledge and understanding of best practices? How will they access and use them? �Discover good practices One approach is to look at who is producing excellent results and is therefore likely to be using good practices. Having discovered these people, you will then need to discern which parts of their overall approach or methods being used are relevant practices. 12

Approaches… �Document good practices Best practice descriptions are usually kept in a database in a standard format �Validate best practices A practice is only “good” or “best” if there is a demonstrable link between what is practiced and the end result. �In most organizations, and especially in areas where practices are constantly evolving, rigorous cause-andeffect analysis is impracticable. Hence a degree of subjective judgment is needed as to what constitutes “best”. �A common approach is to have a panel of reviewers compromising internal and external subject experts and peers, who evaluate a potential best practice against their knowledge of existing practice 13

Approaches… �Disseminate and apply While a database of best practices is a useful starting point, most organizations find it essential to complement this with face-to-face knowledge sharing about those best practices. �Develop a supporting infrastructure Infrastructure to successfully implement a best practice programme, you need to ensure you have the required infrastructure in place. 14

Examples of Best practices A best practice could be related to the implementation of a � program, � a project, � a policy, � a legislation, �a strategy, �an activity, � a manual , etc. 15

Where do best practices come from? A best practice may come from a variety of sources including: �PCDP staff �Government ministries �NGO’s working in pastoral areas �civil society organizations �community groups, and individuals. 16

Procedures for Identifying & Documenting Best Practices Criteria for Selection of best practices Effectiveness: The practice must work and achieve results that are measurable. Efficiency: The proposed practice must produce results with a reasonable level of resources and time. Relevance: The proposed practice must address the priority problems in the pastoral areas. 17

Procedures … �Ethical soundness: The practice must respect rules of ethics for dealing with human populations. �Sustainability: The proposed practice must be implemented over a long period of time without any massive injection of additional resources. �Possibility of duplication: The proposed practice must involve satisfactory collaboration between several stakeholders. 18

Procedures… �Community involvement: the proposed practice must involve participation of the affected communities. �Political commitment: The proposed practice must have support from the relevant national or local authorities. �By definition, a best practice should meet at least the effectiveness, efficiency, and relevance criteria in addition to one or more of the other criteria. A best practice need not meet all the above criteria. 19

Documenting best practices �To ensure readability and a clear presentation of what makes a practice innovative , interesting, informative and, indeed a best practice, the following format will be used �a. Title of the best practice : this should be concise and reflect the practice being documented. �b. Introduction : This should provide the context and justification for the practice and address the following issues 20

Documenting… �What is the problem being addressed? �Which population is being affected? �How is the problem impacting on the population? �What were the objective being achieved? c. Implementation of the practice �What are the main activities carried out? �When & where the activities carried out? �Who were the key implementers and collaborators? �What were the resource implications? 21

Documenting… d. results of the practice-out puts and outcomes: �What were the concrete results achieved in terms of out puts and out comes? �Was an assessment of the practice carried out? If yes, what were the results? e. Lessons learnt �What worked really well –what facilitated this? �What did not work- why it did not work? 22

Documenting… f. Conclusion �How have the results benefited the population? �Why may that intervention be considered a best practice? �Recommendations for those intending to adopt the documented best practice or how it can help people working on the same issues. g. Further reading �Provide a list of references that give additional best practice for those who may be interested in how the results have benefited the population. 23

Disseminating And sharing Best practices Three main methods of dissemination will be used. �The first method will involve issuing a publication entitled pastoral area best practice series. Each issue of the series will include best practices that will promote learning and sharing of experience. �The second method will involve the use of the project web site. A web page will be created on PCDP web site to promote and share pastoral area best practice series. 24

Disseminating… �The third method will involve the distribution of CD-Roms containing best practices during meetings, workshops and training at federal, region and woreda levels. �Addition methods for dissemination will be used as appropriate. 25

Points to be aware of �Establishing a programme to identify and share best practice is not generally a “quick fix” solution for organizations that are relatively new to knowledge management. � Setting up the required processes and infrastructure can be quite a big task, unless you already have some aspects of a knowledge management infrastructure in place. 26

Points to be aware of �Where people are generally encouraged to seek out knowledge and learning, best practices are more likely to emerge and spread. �Try not to get too prescriptive about best practices. Rather than putting in rigid rules that say “this is best practice and you should follow it”, focus more on encouraging people to develop and share best practices voluntarily. 27

Points to be aware of �Do not make the mistake of focusing on capturing best practices for the sake of capturing them. Focus on how they can be used to add value. Who are the users? What are their issues? What kind of knowledge do they need to perform better? How might they best assimilate that knowledge? 28

Points to be aware of… �Be sure to demonstrate the benefits and the evidence. Use case examples to show the benefits of sharing best practices, and as far as possible demonstrate how a best practice has contributed to better performance. � 29

Points… �Remember that best practice is constantly evolving. Therefore feedback mechanisms must be built in so that the value of existing best practices is constantly assessed, and feedback used to create further improvements. �Resist the temptation to focus on explicit knowledge – it cannot be emphasized enough that databases of best practices are insufficient. Databases point to examples and people, but it is through people that deep knowledge is transferred. 30

THANK YOU 31