“Eighty-five percent of the reasons for failure are deficiencies in the systems and process rather than the employee. […] The system is the problem. If you want to improve performance, you must work on the system.”

– Dr. Edwards Deming, Business Theorist

A few years ago, our organization underwent rapid expansion––our staff size nearly tripled in five years––and with that growth, came growing pains. Our practices for running projects weren’t keeping pace with growth. Little issues began to emerge, like teams independently re-inventing how to solve common problems and our experts answering the same questions over and over again. IDinsighters were also spending significant time searching across our systems  for information like organizational policies, technical guidelines, project summaries.

As we talked to peer organizations, we discovered these growing pains were systemic across the sector, fueled by widespread underinvestment in internal infrastructure. ¹ Organizations frequently struggle with fragmented institutional knowledge, inconsistent processes, outdated technical resources, and difficulty applying lessons from past projects. These issues can slow decision-making, waste resources by constantly reinventing the wheel, and miss valuable opportunities to learn and improve.

Funders entrust social sector organizations like ours with operating with maximum efficiency to create the greatest possible good. While these challenges seemed like minor bumps and common growing pains at first, we realized that collectively, they were holding back our overall effectiveness and impact. We couldn’t let inefficiencies fester and hinder our long-term performance–we had a responsibility to address them head-on.

Our view: Efficiency is a moral responsibility in the social sector

In 2021, IDinsight created a Process Improvement Team, a group of dedicated staff laser-focused on solving these behind-the-scenes challenges. The team was created with three goals in mind:

1. Increase impact per dollar by building a solid foundation of knowledge management and operational efficiency.
2. Improve team health by empowering our client-facing teams with better tools, resources, and streamlined processes.
3. Continuously innovate by solving problems in new ways, leading to more opportunities for impact and efficiency.

Our learning approach has focused on doing, testing, and iterating to improve solutions. While our learning journey has been far from perfect, occasional setbacks have been an important part of it.

We aim to share our experiences with others and learn from theirs, fostering greater efficiency and impact across the social sector.

Our approach: Product management meets social impact

We view our project execution tools and processes not as dusty bureaucratic checklists but as powerful, living products designed to amplify impact. We aim to generate delight in our our teammates– our users – by creating products that make their work faster, more efficient, and higher quality so that they can better solve our partners’ complex challenges.

We dislike the term ‘knowledge management.’ It lacks a people focus and invokes images of creating large databases and documents for the sake of documentation. 

To ensure our products are user-centric, we have developed this product lifecycle:

1. Idea Sourcing: We identify improvement opportunities through one-on-one conversations, surveys, Slack channels, an idea submission form, workshops, retreats, and group discussions.
2. Prioritization: We prioritize what to work on based on the anticipated return on investment (benefits divided by costs). We run an annual prioritization exercise and periodically re-evaluate as we learn more throughout the year. 
3. Solution Development: We develop a project plan using a common format that includes a description of the deliverables, expected benefits, resources required, and approach to change management. 
4. User Testing: We iteratively test solutions with different user groups. One common feedback group is our ‘advisory board,’ a group of teammates from across the organization who have volunteered to provide expert feedback. 
5. Launch and Distribution: When we have something that is “good enough,” we launch it to the organization. However, we may choose to continue refining the product to increase its value. 
6. Change Management: Each solution is launched along with a change management plan, a key part of ensuring new practices are adopted and thus generate value. Change management strategies can include launching messages to user groups on Slack, training sessions, integration with onboarding processes, making changes simple, and highlighting success stories. 
7. Measuring Success: We measure value by assessing how often a tool is used (which many platforms do automatically) and how much benefit users get from using it. 

Example wins 

Over the past two years, we’ve launched dozens of tools, products, and systems, including revamped knowledge systems, technical resources, execution templates, guidelines, and analysis reports. Here are three examples:

1. An interactive project portfolio exploration tool. IDinsight has run 200+ projects in our 12+ year history. Teammates find it much harder to keep up with our institutional knowledge than they did when we were a smaller organization. However, understanding and learning from our past work is critical for solving today’s problems more effectively. The tool we created shows a map of our project portfolio and lets users search the portfolio by common features like sector, partner, and IDinsight service. IDinsighters use the tool to connect to project folders where they can review project plans, technical documents, reports, and other materials. They also use the tool to identify and connect with teammates with specialized expertise or experience. Finally, the tool gives summary trends, like how demand for different services is changing over time, that we use to reflect on how we can evolve as an organization to better serve our partners. 
2. An AI-powered knowledge-management chatbot. To more quickly connect IDinsighters with the answers to their questions, we worked with our Data Science team to create an AI-powered knowledge management chatbot that seamlessly searches our public website, intranet, relevant Slack channels, and shared knowledge drives to find and organize responses to user questions. We estimate the platform has saved 1,000+ employee hours by making information retrieval more efficient and intuitive. For more information on how your organization can use AI to improve efficiency, read here.
3. Updated technical tools and guidelines. As we work with our partners to solve new problems, we are constantly innovating on how to use rigorous data and evidence tools to solve social sector problems. However, as our organization grows and the task of solving problems spreads across more people, an increasing part of this innovation was not mainstreamed back into our common knowledge base. We had to get it out of people’s heads and into an accessible place for all to use. To address this, we worked with our research engineering and design team to identify research methods experts who created and updated best practices for common technical tasks. We’ve organized these tools on our intranet and trained staff on how and when to use them. Determining what to standardize has been tricky. Most of our work involves generating bespoke solutions for our client’s context-specific problems. However, a small core of common activities can be standardized and therefore innovated. Our task has been to steadily raise this foundation on which our teammates operate. 

Major lessons learned

1. Success starts with user-centric solutions

Our journey has reinforced a crucial lesson from product management: the key to successful outcomes is to truly understand the user. We adopted practices to learn about our users throughout our process, including an idea submission form, prioritization polls, user workshops, feedback sessions with targeted user groups, and easy feedback submission buttons on our tools.

2. Do things that don’t scale

We’ve come to appreciate the start-up advice of doing things that don’t scale. We have sometimes been daunted by how much effort it would take to solve a certain problem. However, putting our heads down and manually pushing through a challenge—without a clear off-ramp—often led to improvements and more sustainable solutions. For example, updating the format and content of each page on our expansive intranet was initially a heavy lift. Yet, after this big initial push, teams across the organization gradually began to take ownership of updating their content with less and less help from us, paving the way to long-term sustainability.

3. No one knows anything

We embraced the idea that ‘no one knows anything’ (which we first encountered in The Netflix Way), a concept that highlights the value of quickly testing a concept rather than debating its merits endlessly. Another version of this is ‘demos, not memos.’

4. Build it and they will come ignore it

We only generate impact when our teammates meaningfully use our products in ways that increase their impact or save them time.  However, people are busy and inclined to stick to what they know during crunch time. Our early efforts focused too much on building new tools and not nearly enough on creating an effective change management process that would lead to sustained use. With intentional change management, we increased the uptake of our new products and generated significant value. 

5. Celebrating collaboration fuels innovation

Our progress results from the collective efforts of our teams across functions, levels, and regions. Recognizing contributions from every member has built a culture of collaborative innovation and driven deeper engagement. When contributors feel valued, they’re more likely to embrace, adapt, and improve upon the tools and resources we create, amplifying our overall success.

Having similar problems and innovative ideas? Let’s connect!

As IDinsight expands, we remain committed to smarter work—whether it’s through automation, tech innovation, streamlined data, or sharper project planning. If you are an organization facing similar hurdles or looking to boost efficiency and impact, we’d love to connect and exchange ideas to help each other build stronger, more effective teams. Please reach out to us at impact.improvement@idinsight.org.