Talk:Project-based working

@MichaelMaggs: Can the wording of this page be made a bit more balanced? The idea is good on the face of it, but to establish that it's worth moving totally to that model, we need a balanced consideration of relative advantages and disadvantages.

The main change that is taking place in moving to project-based working appears to be that something is going to be forbidden: charitable support will only go to activities that are part of a project. So there will be a decrease in flexibility and responsiveness to unanticipated needs, and there will be less scope for staff to make decisions about what benefits the charity. That does not mean that it is a bad step on the whole, but the disadvantages need to be stated clearly so that we can address whether the benefits of this way of working are worth it. MartinPoulter (talk) 18:10, 19 June 2015 (BST)

Hi @MartinPoulter:, I think that's probably what the talk page/email and other discussion avenues are for, getting down to the detail and thinking about the implications of some of the proposals. We also want to keep the pages reasonably concise (and I'm aware that for some people there's already more reading than they have time for!), so presenting a structure, per volunteer strategy documents, allows us to do that and have more open discussion off the page itself where we can tease out some of the uncertainty and be a bit more discursive (rather than being very led by the board/staff involved in writing so far). Hope that makes sense.

On the issues you raise. It in part depends how you construe 'project', but there is potentially some loss of flexibility and more direction to the work that is supported. That need not mean a loss of responsiveness, and in fact we're hoping that by engaging in more joined up project work we can encourage and support 'add on' projects more easily as a way of maximising impact. It might mean we respond to different opportunities though, and of course that has implications. Ditto staff input, their knowledge is incredibly valuable and will of course remain important in developing our project work, although as with volunteers such work will generally need to be developed in project terms. The introduction of new panels - which can draw on expertise from across the charity - to incubate and evaluate also provides space for staff input alongside volunteer, and I hope will help both staff and volunteers to use their particular role-expertise to think about e.g. recruiting people, communicating before/after the event, etc.etc.

It's also important to note that we're not proposing to scrap e.g. small grants for book purchases, although we will need to work out how we approach those kinds of support. Sjgknight (talk) 19:19, 23 June 2015 (BST)