16th Meeting of Senior Fellowships Officers of the ... - Development

Operational Issues 33
velopment continued to believe that knowledge and attitude could not be changed and
measured. 2) Inadequately trained people on logical Project Management. DCAAP
had found this course to be the most valuable course when linked with the Logframe.
However, it turned out that most of the people who took that course had been project
staff, and not project managers. Most project managers went on study tours to
share and see specific practices, but not the conceptual management and operation of
specific development projects. 3) Lack of functional outputs. Some training courses
required participants to produce certain hypothetical outputs which were not useful
when participants went back to their offices. 4) Widespread use of non-participatory
training methods. Lecture continued to be the most common training method used in
Asia, the Pacific and Africa in spite of the fact that it was the least effective among the
various teaching methods. 5) Irrelevant training courses: Many training participants
had noted that several training courses offered by numerous training institutions were
not directly relevant to their needs. It was a common practice for business-oriented
and infrastructure-oriented training institutions to float course titles which sounded
development-oriented such as Project Management and Monitoring and Evaluation.
Development project staff who had taken those courses had complained that issues
discussed had been quite different from their needed knowledge, attitude and skill.
114. Being aware of the persistence of those training gaps, DCAAP had designed a training
strategy that could fill up the gaps by offering training courses which were: 1) Human
development-oriented. DCAAP helped participants to clearly understand and appreciate
the fundamentals of inner human development which guided people’s behavior
such as knowledge, attitude and skill (KAS). Since learning was the product of changed
KAS, all courses emphasized on developing and measuring KAS. 2) Project management-oriented.
DCAAP’s Development Management Paradigm (DMP) differed from
Business Management Paradigm (BMP). While BMP followed Planning, Staffing/Organizing,
Directing/Leading and Controlling, DMP started with Research, Planning,
Staffing/Organizing, Directing/Coordinating, Implementation, and Monitoring and
Evaluation reminding that a program, project or activity was only considered complete
when the monitoring and evaluation report was accepted by management. 3)
Functional output-oriented. DCAAP encouraged all participants to bring with them
problematic project documents or component activities. Many project documents of
foreign assisted projects were designed by foreign experts who had limited time implementing
big projects. Project documents were left at the conceptual level and passed
on to national project managers who had not participated in the project formulation
stage and therefore spent much time thinking on how to start an approved project.
Usually, the national project managers sent some of their staff to the DCAAP course
on Project Implementation, Monitoring and Evaluation who at the end of the course
often stated that their project manager should have been with them in the course. 4)
Participatory-oriented. DCAAP training methods were participatory combining lecture
with discussion, question-and-answer, group workshops, individual exercises and
study visits. Each participant or group of participants was asked to make a report of