December 19, 2007
Who’s doing What Where? (And more importantly, Why?)
The single most important co-ordination tool that you will find in any humanitarian response is the Who’s doing What Where, better known as the W3 or 3W. This is the basic tracking that shows which organisations (who) are doing which activities (what) in which locations (where). It comes in a limited range of flavours, and it’s usually a spreadsheet with a simple matrix by location.
For some reason, here they’ve decided to add an extra W - When. I have no idea why they decided to do this, since we’ve never been able to successfully get the first 3Ws; the decision was taken before I arrived, and I would have fought tooth and claw to stop it. To be fair, I’ve been asked for a chronological component in other places, because it’s really useful to know what plans organisations have.
The problem is, I think the W3 sucks. To be more precise, I think our current approach to the W3 sucks. Why do I think so? Because it never bloody works, that’s why. I’ve been through this process in every emergency I’ve ever worked in, and I’ve never seen it work. Sometimes we’ve managed to fake it, but that’s not the same thing as having a really solid information system that provides useful analysis.
There’s no doubt that knowing who’s doing what where is essential to coordinating a humanitarian response, so we need to rethink the entire thing urgently. I chaired a meeting of the Information Management Working Group yesterday, and we reflected on the problems that we’d had implementing the W3 and how we’d dealt with them. That will go into a longer document that Neil Bauman and I are going to write up, but here are the headline problems for me right now:
a. We set up templates for people to fill out, but they never use them. This is because the forms don’t resemble anything they use internally for planning their activities, and they don’t have a good reason to fill out our forms in addition to their own.
b. When they do use our formats, they inevitably fill them out incorrectly. This means that you have to work out what on earth they were trying to tell you when they were typing out their information. Is that really 18 water purification plants in one union location? Surely not.
c. We ask for quite a high level of detail - in my opinion, an unreasonably high level of detail - without really asking whether that much detail is useful. As a result, people are often put off by the thought of that level of reporting - particularly if their own organisation doesn’t ask them for that much information, why should a co-ordinator?
d. As a result, most of the time we just get the information in whatever format they have with whatever detail they have it in already or can be bothered to submit it in. This means that we have to shoehorn it into our format (usually unsuccessfully) and then pretend that we’ve got some useful data. In reality, the coverage is patchy at best and the accuracy is questionable - by the time you’ve typed it up, it’s already out of date.
e. A lot of the time - especially in the early stages of a response - people simply don’t know exactly what their organisation is doing. They know roughly what activities their organisations are going to undertake, and in roughly what locations, but precision is not their usual frame of mind.
Having said that, it’s clear that people and organisations do plan their activities, so the question is - how do we get a better picture of what they’re doing? That will probably be the subject of my next post, once I’ve finished cutting and pasting NFI distribution data into this bloody spreadsheet for the meeting today.
Filed under Bangladesh, Co-ordination by Paul Currion
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Comments on Who’s doing What Where? (And more importantly, Why?) »
Tom L @ 10:10 am
If the reporting template issue can’t be solved before the emergency, I wouldn’t hold out much hope of implementing it now.
Given the time-critical nature of W3, could you employ a squad of data clerks in the information team to do the crunching task manually? An Dhaka-based NGO like D:Net could probably perform this task for you.
Matthew Slater @ 8:47 pm
As a newcomer to the profession, it was immediately obvious to me that W3 was a first, and primitively implemented step towards using IT to coordinate organisations in the field. It was also obvious, browsing through OCHA’s W3, that it was incomplete, and much less useful because of that. So It’s good to hear someone actually saying this. So what next? If the information is so valuable, maybe merely sending out forms, however usable, won’t be enough. Maybe someone needs to be more proactive in collecting it? Maybe the system doesn’t reward organisations enough to bother filling in a form? Maybe organisations don’t understand the wider benefits to the operation of a coordination mechanism?
Paul Currion @ 2:44 am
Tom - the problem isn’t the data entry (because we don’t have enough data to worry about), but data collection (because we don’t have enough data to worry about).
Hiring additional staff would help in terms of (for example) phoning around the agencies, but the key to successful information gathering is building relationships with those agencies - and that’s not something that can be solved by adding more staff, unfortunately, only by investing more time.
Paul Currion @ 2:46 am
Matt - all of the above. Yes, we need to be more proactive in gathering it - our best information came from just phoning people up and asking them what they were doing (although we didn’t get much detail, at least we had agency coverage).
As you point out, the key is creating an incentive for agencies to fill out the form. The only way of doing this that I can think of is to turn the information around quickly and give them back some useful products that help them in the field - anything else is not interesting to them.
Nick Rabinowitz @ 11:06 pm
Paul, here’s my quick take - the only way to solve this question is to integrate the W3 reporting with reporting that organizations are doing already. From my perspective, the best candidate here is in the existing process of situation reporting - most or all organizations include the key information required by the W3 in their internal sitreps.
In the ideal world of my imagining, a few common standards for sitreps would allow for quick, efficient aggregation of W3 data from multiple organizations, without requiring field staff to enter any more information than they do now. I think there’s a real opportunity for an approach that kills several birds with one stone here - improving the current sitrep process and using those improvements to attack the problems you’re describing here.
I’d be very interested in your thoughts on this approach - in my opinion, the more the different reporting functions are integrated, the better it will be for everyone: less work for the field staff, better and more up-to-date information for the coordinating bodies.
Tom L @ 1:52 pm
“…(because we don’t have enough data to worry about … (because we don’t have enough data to worry about)”
Is this because there is really a drought, or useful stuff is pre-bottled in house and totally inaccessible for sharing purposes?
Paul Currion @ 8:38 am
There’s really a drought. Even when you tap the in-house situation reporting, a lot of it is narrative (and much of that is filler). We don’t have is a serious evidence-driven programming culture, which means little pressure to present useful data.
Having said that, the accessibility question is also an issue - just not so much of one. Realistically, I don’t want to have access to everybody’s internal reporting - I just need that reporting to be done better.
Paul Currion @ 8:44 am
Nick, apologies for not having been in touch with you - as you probably noticed, I was a little busy in Bangladesh! I will be in touch in the new year…
In response to your point:
I’m not sure how we would integrate reporting in that way, given that a) there isn’t an agreed W3 format, and b) we have no leverage to make people accept it. I think that the existing form-based approach (”Here’s a new form - fill it in for me”) just doesn’t work.
If we look at (for example) NFI distribution, what I needed was a) agencies to have decent distribution plans, and b) agencies to give me those distribution plans. I can do the rest, in terms of turning that into useful W3 analysis. What I got suggested that either agencies don’t have decent distribution plans (in the sense of being particularly coherent or detailed), or that b) they just aren’t prepared to give them to me.
The problem is that sitreps don’t contain sufficient detail to be useful - most of the information is aggregated. Now we can build a W3 at that aggregated level, but I am consistently asked for much more detail, which is impossible to deliver. The short answer to the problem is the development of an evidence-driven programming culture, of which I will write more in the near future…
Jeremy @ 9:37 am
Wow, my second post today! Don’t know what’s come over me.
Speaking as one of those pesky NGO types who can’t be bothered to properly fill out the 3W forms….
I think your analysis is more or less correct. In my experience with these forms, they tend to be either 1) so general as to be useless (i.e. grouping very different activities together under common headings) or 2) so overly detailed that they’re not burdensome and consequently ignored. Rarely is a useful balance found.
Likewise, as you point out, NGOs tend to fill them out based in varying internal standards. The fact is that from an NGO’s perspective, filling out 3W forms tends to get low priority (for all of the reasons previously noted) and so NGO staff aren’t going to commit a lot of time to deciphering the format and adapting their internal data to fit it - particularly if they’re not confident that it will result in a useful tool at the end of the day.
The cluster system (about which I have maaaaany reservations) could provide a way forward by creating a context in which key implementers and technical actors develop joint 3W tools for their respective sectors, and the cluster lead can more directly promote adherence to those tools. One of the additional problems with traditional 3W tools is that they tend to be put together by OCHA generalists who don’t necessarily know, sector by sector, which bits of info are relevant to coordination and which are not. By decentralizing this process out to the clusters, the cluster system has the potential to make some progress on this. However, as noted in my other post, the cluster leads might not actually live up this this in practice.
Lastly - I fully agree that proactively contacting the relevant actors is the best way to get the information you need. I (and I think, most NGO folks) tend to be much more responsive to a phone call or direct meeting than to a mass email with a generic attachment.
Paul Currion @ 8:43 pm
Good lord, an NGO worker. Somebody get him back in his cage before he starts causing trouble…
Jeremy, I have a question for you. Taking into account everything that you’ve said, what outputs of a W3 information system would you find useful? Narrative reports, maps, graphs and charts? Showing other organisation’s work, or showing your own? Is there any analysis that you think would be worthwhile?