Presenter Elena Wrelton

Ministry for the Environment Waste Minimisation Fund case study

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In December 2010, this funding programme featured in a Good Practice in Action seminar organised by the Office for the Community and Voluntary Sector. The presenter was Elena Wrelton, Analyst, Funds Management Team, Ministry for the Environment.

View Powerpoint slides (Powerpoint 536.5KB)

Important lessons learned

  • There is a trade off between the rigor and flexibility of criteria and business processes and the workload and cost of managing the funds. The more flexible the criteria and processes the more costly is fund management.
  • Process automation on its own will not deliver lower costs, there needs to be accompanying rigorous business processes.
  • Greater business process rigor can be more staff intensive to deliver particularly when done manually.
  • Building greater business process and systems automation should be relative to the size of the fund given the up-front capital cost implications.
  • Strong robust criteria contributes to lower management costs as it weeds out ineligible applications and simplifies evaluation processes.
  • There is limited knowledge across funds as to the applicant experience – design of the WMF should consider how applicant feedback might be provided for
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Process good practice

All funders have clear criteria backed up by clear business processes with varying degrees of audit and accountability. Some of the good practices (and the questions they raise) are noted below:

Criteria – broad versus tight and getting it right

  • Getting the balance right is complex – making it too simple for the applicant makes it too complex for the funder (hard to screen and separate if too easy)’
  • Be clear about what you want to fund and don’t want to fund, and how much funding is available.

Staged applications

  • Use of feasibility studies to reduce risks of funding ‘unproven’ projects
  • Flexibility to stage projects based on complexity or by application size
  • Simple 1st stage application process for larger applications followed by more thorough phase
  • Streamline the evaluation process for small grants

Risk management

  • Managing risk is key to fund effectiveness
  • Risk assessments are helpful as part of guiding application evaluation and monitoring
  • Risk can be assessed based on value of application, past experience with applicant, complexity of application and other known information regarding applicant/project
  • Risk profiles should be updated as projects progress. It should be held for future applications

Panel assessment

  • All funds use panels for grants recommendations (and often the final decision)
  • Most funds use external expertise to support application assessment
  • Number of funding rounds – don’t want to overload panel by having too few or too many – can lead to incomplete assessment and poor decisions
  • Build in turnover of internal panel members to grow expertise

Contracts

  • Risk assessment used to determine funding structure
  • Payment on milestones not invoice
  • Retention payments to ensure both project completion and post project reporting
  • Multiple year funding is necessary for some larger projects, particularly waste infrastructure projects
  • Contract should ensure remedial work must be undertaken if recommended by audit
  • Measuring the ongoing effectiveness of a project after completion is important but difficult to enforce
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People good practice

Staffing and roles

  • There is a wide variation in staff numbers compared to fund size and application numbers. The primary driver of staffing intensity is the degree of business process rigor and the automation of the processes
  • Roles are similar across funds: management/co-ordination, administration, advisors
  • The degree of pre-screening of applications by advisors varies widely and is dependent on fund processes and the experience and sector knowledge of staff
  • Most fund advisors do not make recommendations to panels they provide application summaries and assess against criteria
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Technology good practice

Automation / Support

  • The key decision is the degree of control the system exerts over workflow and business process, there is a spectrum from lose control of business process to tight control and these have complexity, flexibility and cost implications
  • Close integration of core functions (contracts, document management, payments, client information etc.) is important
  • Building evaluation and scoring into system with accompanying audit trail is a significant time saver
  • Automated alerts and reminders for project milestones were found to be useful tools to assist business process
  • Build in workflow for time consuming processes (e.g. approvals)
  • Systems which populate documents were seen to be helpful as long as they remained flexible and documents were editable
  • Reporting
  • Automated capture of required information through process
  • Selection of common reports supported by ad-hoc queries