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"The professionalism and competence demonstrated by Delta Partnership is surely going to enable the Embassy make a mark in addressing gender inequality issues in Kenya"
— Chihenyo Mvoyi-Kang'ara, Royal Danish Embassy, Kenya

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“They showed creativity, commitment and professionalism in delivering the end product, to a tight timetable yet with a high level of quality”

Joyce Nyamweya, Public Service Reform Secretariat, Kenya

Wahome Gachihi

Wahome is the Kenya Business Manager for Delta Partnership and is a valued member of the core team. His roles include business procurement, developing company management systems, and providing general support to the directors and associates. He is the main point of contact for the Kenya office. Wahome is a graduate of the University of Wales, Cardiff with an MBA with a financial bias. He has a passion for management consultancy focussing on organisational process redesign.

Hannah Swan

Hannah is Delta Partnership’s full-time UK business manager and is based in the London office. She keeps the office running effectively and efficiently and is a main point of contact for associates, clients and partners. She is responsible for the daily administration of the company, and assists in business development, marketing and IT strategy. Hannah is a graduate from Manchester University with a degree in Economics and Social Sciences and has a passion for business management and international consultancy.

Kevin Sansom

Kevin specialises in institutional development and project management of multi-disciplinary programmes with more than 25 years experience of performance improvement in the public sector, including substantial work on international development and sector reform programmes. He has extensive experience of working in Africa, Asia, Caribbean and the UK. As a principal consultant to Delta Partnership he has managed a number of projects including the strengthening of 10 leading government agencies in Guyana, as part of a wider reform programme. Kevin was the strategic adviser for a review of public service organizations in Uganda, in conjunction with local partners, focusing on accountability and performance management. He also undertook an organisational structure review for the International Trade Centre in Geneva.

While at WEDC, Loughborough University he has been responsible for a substantial portfolio of strategic consultancy, research and capacity development projects, for international development organisations and governments. He also managed project development and review assignments for the UK Department for International Development (DFID) in China, India, Uganda and Kenya and was responsible for the project management elements of the World Bank evaluation of the Mumbai slum sanitation programme. Kevin was a co-director of the national government supported Change Management Forum for urban water services in India. He also undertakes post-graduate lecturing on management related issues. In summary he has good knowledge and experience in performance management, public sector reforms, water utilities management, NGO – government relations, public private partnerships and poverty focused approaches.

Louise Shaxson

Louise has a passion for evidence based policy making and research-policy relationships. This has made her a key resource to her clients who are looking for strong strategic thinking, a questioning approach, and rigorous analysis.

She has written guidance on what constitutes robust evidence for policy making, advised on horizon scanning projects and has led strategic planning exercises which focus on delivering value for money in complex organisational environments. She has also designed business processes to source, assemble and interpret evidence for ‘wicked’ issues; advised on the provision of expert scientific advice to senior policy officials and improved external engagement in strategy and planning processes.

Louise received a Fulbright scholarship for her MSc in agricultural economics at Cornell University in the USA, before working as an applied economist for the Natural Resources Institute. A skilled facilitator, she has designed and led many events ranging from Board-level interdepartmental reviews to large multi-stakeholder workshops, focused strategic planning exercises and small team building events. Louise has also published several journal articles and book chapters relating to evidence-based policy making.

This October Louise gave a presentation at the Canadian Science Policy Conference in Montreal on the distribution of responsibility in policy delivery and relating issues. To view her presentation please click here.

A short video blog of Louise talking on the subject of policy delivery was also recorded and can be viewed by following the link below.

http://blogs.fco.gov.uk/roller/arbour/entry/louise_shaxson_and_her_take

Please do comment on the issues raised by Louise on the Science Policy conference blog by following the link: http://blogs.fco.gov.uk/roller/arbour/entry/guest_blog_participants_from_the.

If you would like any more information please do not hesitate to contact her personally at louise@deltapartnership.com.

Links to a selection of these publications are available below;

Shaxson, L; Harrison, M & Morgan, M (2009) Developing an evidence-based approach to environmental policy making: lessons from Defra’s Evidence & Innovation Strategy. SPRU Electronic Working Paper 181. Brighton: Science Policy Research Unit. Available from http://www.sussex.ac.uk/spru/research/sewps

Shaxson, L (2009) Structuring policy problems for plastics, the environment and human health: reflections from the UK. Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B 364, 2141-2151. doi: 10.1098/rstb.2008.0283. Available from http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/364/1526/2141.abstract

Shaxson, L J (2009) Cost-effective tools for managing the SCP evidence base: taking a knowledge brokering approach to policy making. Report of Defra project EV0410. 33pp + 23pp. Available from http://randd.defra.gov.uk/Default.aspx?Menu=Menu&Module=More&Location=None&Completed=0&ProjectID=15656#RelatedDocuments .

Bielak, A.; Campbell, A.; Pope, S.; Schaefer, K.; & Shaxson, L. (2008). From Science Communication to Knowledge Brokering: the Shift from ‘Science Push’ to ‘Policy Pull’. In D. Cheng, M. Claessens, T. Gascoigne, J. Metcalfe, B. Schiele, & S. Shi (Eds.), Communicating Science in Social Contexts: New models, new practices(pp. 201-226). Dordrecht: Springer. Available from http://www.springerlink.com/content/r31u471088ww5j54/

Wilson, D., N. Smith, N Blakey & L Shaxson (2007) Using Research-Based Knowledge to Underpin Waste & Resources Policy. Waste Management & Research 25 (3) pp 247-256. Winner of the CIWM award for best publication of 2007. Available from http://wmr.sagepub.com/cgi/reprint/25/3/247.pdf

Bochel, H. and L.J. Shaxson (2007) Forward looking policy making. Chapter 2 in Bochel, H. & S. Duncan (eds) (2007) Making Policy in Theory and Practice. Bristol: The Policy Press. Available from http://www.policypress.co.uk/display.asp?m=71&dc=781&mw=0&q=(eh_hide_flag%20contains%20(‘n’))

Shaxson, L.J. (2005) “Is your evidence robust enough? Questions for policy makers and practitioners”. Journal of Evidence & Policy 1(1): 101-111. Available from http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/tpp/ep/2005/00000001/00000001/art00006

Mike Thomson

Mike is a former management consultant with KPMG, a chartered accountant and a founder of Delta Partnership. This breadth of experience has given him the skills and discipline to manage and deliver on a multitude of projects. He has extensive experience in strategy development, monitoring and evaluation, organisational process redesign, financial and performance management assignments over a 20-year career in both the private and public sectors in the UK and overseas.

He has worked on several major public sector and civil service reform assignments in East Africa, Latin American and the Caribbean. For example, Mike managed a three year an assignment with the Brazil National Audit Office which developed a new system of performance auditing for federal education, health and environmental programmes and which forged a partnership with the UK National Audit Office. Mike has also been supporting the Pan Caribbean AIDS Partnership (PANCAP) to improve the management of HIV/AIDS programmes across the whole region, developing a service charter and strengthening organisational partnerships. He has also recently overseen the production of manuals for the Government of Dubai on strategic planning, policy making and performance management, building on work done by the UK Cabinet Office and the Office of the Prime Minister.

In the UK Mike has led major consultancy work with various public sector bodies including the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, the Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accounting and the Health and Safety Executive. He has advised on the capability needs of senior civil servants in the areas of evidence based policy making, monitoring and evaluation. He has also worked with several local authorities. Since 2008, Mike has been the UK coordinator of DFID’s programme of strategic support to civil service reform in Ethiopia.

Aileen Lyon

Aileen Lyon is an international social and institutional development specialist who brings creative solutions to her clients through an inclusive and energized process of problem solving. She has worked for over 13 years in East Africa and a number of years in Asia, EU and UK.

As a founding director of Delta Partnership, her consultancy assignments have included; ongoing work to support civil society involvement in the Balkans Safety, Security and Access to Justice Programme; the evaluation of a DFID-funded pro-poor project in China; institutional assessment of NGOs in Kenya; and, the provision of social development inputs on a programme to upgrade the provision of public services in Bulgaria.

Her past experience includes being the Country Director of a major NGO in Kenya and a social development employee of GHK, where she focused on social inclusion, gender and integrated project management assignments in Asia and Eastern Europe. Aileen has also taught and consulted widely in Tanzania, working with the co-operative sector, with local AIDS researchers and on women’s development projects.

Aileen has a Masters Degree in Social Policy and Planning from LSE and has qualified as a member of the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants. She speaks English, Swahili and French.

Watch out for Acronymania..

Delta Director Louise Shaxson shares her views on the overuse, misuse and pure absurdity of the acronym craze.

Acronymania: a craze for forming acronyms

(Chambers English Dictionary, 1990 edition)

Acronyms were initially developed as abbreviations, constructed (sometimes with the addition of extra letters) to create a pronounceable word from the contraction. Many acronyms have become words in their own right (radar while others (BBC, ITV, UN) are so widely understood that they have attained word-like status. They can help us give out information quickly, cram more information on the page, and type our e-mails faster.

Those are the good things about them. The rest is not quite so helpful.

We know acronyms can be irritating, but they have more serious drawbacks too. The scale of the problem becomes apparent when you hear that Google shows about 1,620,000 lists of acronyms: the Acronym Finder prides itself on containing over 315,000 definitions in its database.

Acronyms exclude…

Acronyms exclude people from conversations: the group that understands the acronym becomes a clique of those-in-the-know. Imagine you have just been appointed to a Government post and are meeting a group of people from various departments. I introduce myself.“My name is Jane Bloggs: I run a research programme under the RNRRS”

“How would you feel? You might anticipate some in-jokes which could make you feel marginal to the meeting, and you would not hear my next sentences as you try to work out what RNRRS is. Admittedly “Renewable Natural Resources Research Strategy” is a mouthful, but at least it does what it says on the tin.

Although acronyms make the conversation faster, they leave behind those who are ‘too slow’ to keep up. This is often frustrating but can be more serious if acronyms are used liberally in a mix of junior and senior people, or in front of newcomers. Those most disadvantaged by acronym abuse are less likely to speak up, but are often the ones who are trying to establish their credibility in the group and who most need the meeting. In the worst cases people can use acronyms to bamboozle, to deter sticky questions, or to create an inner circle within a group.

They are hierarchical and bureaucratic…

Acronyms reinforce hierarchies: senior people will generally have more acronyms at their fingertips and be able to wield them in an “I’m extremely busy, please deal with this quickly” sort of way. There are parallels here with the use of jargon – another form of shorthand. Both acronyms and jargon are useful for communicating complex ideas, but only if you know that the person you are talking or writing to already understands what you are going on about. If they don’t, these people remain outside the clique, forever referring to glossaries and being too embarrassed to ask thier colleagues for clarification.

Acronyms symbolise an organisation’s culture: the more there are, the less likely you will be able to find your way around it. They prevent outsiders from looking in, keeping the poor wretches bemused by a welter of mismatched letters and unpronounceable names. It is hard to understand organisational relationships at the best of times, but particularly so when its structure is spelled out in acronyms. Names like SESDG, AMED, CEFAS, tell you nothing about their work; and we often get stuck with an old acronym that doesn’t reflect any more what the organisation does or how it works (ADAS). We communicate better with both outsiders and colleagues if we use names and titles that show clearly our position and our prime responsibilities.

Acronyms encourage bureaucracy and discourage personal responsibility, as people hide behind the post and its acronym rather than laying claim to what they have said or written. Is “HOD” any more powerful than Jo Jones, when Jo Jones is your departmental head?

Acronyms can also give outsiders the impression of a secretive, closed and bureaucratic organisation – an image that doesn’t help build public trust or attract the best staff.

They slow you down and obfuscate instead of explain…

The higher we move in an organisation, the more pressure there is to shorten documents sent to busy people, but reducing word counts by using acronyms is generally a false economy. People retain information better if it flows clearly, which doesn’t happen if you are laboriously flicking back and forth between text and glossaries. How often have you searched intranets to find out which organisation, programme or project someone is referring to in an email?

The Small Business Service is not the same as Save British Science or, let’s not forget, the Special Boat Service (as any bloke will immediately tell you with this particular acronym); we’re not sure if Fred Smith works in sustainable Development or Science Directorate; and were you asked to send the documents to the Scottish Agricultural College or the Science Advisory Council?

It’s generally a mistake to assume we know what acronyms mean. We get it right some of the time, wrong some of the time, but mostly have to refer back to page vi (or was it viii? Where’s the glossary? It’s 3 pages long: how am I going to remember all that? Why is it after the executive summary? I’ve lost my place and spilt my tea. I’m going to do something else).

They are a problem for the writer as well as the speaker…

Acronyms create difficulties not just for the listener: like jargon, they are a lazy way of communicating. We understand better what we are writing if we are made to spell it out clearly. Making something snappier and more powerful is a matter of creating a strong and logical line of argument and saying it as plainly as possible, not of cramming as much information as you can onto the page by taking communication short-cuts. A journalists’ rule for concise writing is to go through what you have written and cut out as many words as you can, and then to do the same again, while making sure you lose none of the meaning. Acronyms are only used with extreme caution.

Using acronyms when we write relates to our penchant for creating A Very Important Title out of a perfectly simple description. Why should a project on evidence based policy making become The Evidence Based Policy Making Project? It sounds pompous and will only become acronym-ised to the EBPM project, which tells us nothing. This Tendency to use unnecessary Capital Letters makes us write like Winnie The Pooh and is possibly the Driving Force behind Acronymania.

Developing an acronym etiquette:

Ordering people to abandon acronyms altogether seems drastic and unlikely to work. So here is the beginning of an etiquette.

1. Think carefully about the audience you are writing for or speaking to. This applies even when you talk to, or email, close associates. The extra few moments it takes to explain an acronym should be a common courtesy.

2. Use an acronym only if you are absolutely sure everyone who is likely to read or hear it understands it perfectly.

3. Otherwise, explain each acronym before its first use. Write the name or phrase out in full with the acronyms in brackets, not the other way round. In long documents, explain each acronym before you use it in each section.

4. If you only use an acronym once, don’t use it at all. You don’t need it.

5. Always think how you can say the same thing without using an acronym. Write “the project to abandon acronyms” rather than “The Acronym- Abandonment Project”.

6. Ask people to explain acronyms if you don’t understand them. The more people who ask what someone’s talking about, the more likely they are to begin to explain themselves clearly.

7. If you are writing to Ministers, don’t use acronyms. Ever.

By Louise & Nicholas Shaxson, with heartfelt assistance from Jenny Marsden, Howard Dalton, Tim Bradshaw, Tony Burne, Miles Parker, Deborah Wells & Michael Harrison. This article first appeared in Landscape, Defra’s in-house magazine, in June 2004.

Road Map for the Role of the Southern Sudan Reconstruction and Development Fund

Delta worked to set out how the mandate of the Southern Sudan Reconstruction and Development Fund (SSRDF) relates to the management of the Multi-Donor Trust Fund (MDTF) and to other forms of donor funding dedicated to reconstruction, and how it should be better operationalized. The report made several key recommendations that were considered and taken forward by the Joint Donor Team. It was recommended that the future direction of the SSRDF should be focused in the areas of technical advice and strategic direction, complemented with some other key strategic functions.

Support to the Development of Science and Evidence Strategies for the Health and Safety Executive (HSE)

Delta consultants facilitated a series of workshops to improve the functional engagement of a wide range of stakeholders in scoping the evidence base. For the Health & Safety Executive (HSE) Delta piloted an evidence mapping process in three core areas, before stepping back and providing light-touch support to Departmental staff to run their own workshops. This ensured that evidence needs were clearly scoped in relation to the business goals of the HSE, with the overall aim of increasing the efficiency with which it will procure its evidence in future.

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