Actionaid is an international anti-poverty agency whose aim is to fight poverty worldwide. Formed in 1972, it is helping over 13 million of the world’s poorest and most disadvantaged people in 46 countries worldwide. Actionaid International (AAI) works with local partners in every region, ranging from small community support groups to national alliances and international networks.

Objective

With a highly decentralized mode of operations and over 2,000 local partner organizations worldwide, AAI was looking for an efficient way of tracking the internal processes of every organizational unit. The solution would also need to centrally store the outcomes of these processes.

Action Aid especially approached iridium Interactive (ii) for this project. Given ii’s culture of social consciousness, AAI was confident “that we would not only understand the domain, but also work with a level of passion that matches theirs,” states ii CEO, Sriram Bharatam. And AAI required a solution that would be crucial to supporting and strengthening AAI’s rights-based work.

Solution

After several meetings, discussions and brainstorming sessions with AAI, ii designed and implemented a Process Flow Management System for internal processes. This was christened ALPS – Accountability, Learning and Planning System. This initiative aims to create a mechanism through which processes are tracked and documents can be linked and accessed by stakeholders for the defined processes.

ALPS is a framework that sets out the key accountability requirements, guidelines, and processes in AAI – not only in terms of organizational processes for planning, monitoring, strategy formulation, learning, reviewing and auditing, but also personal attitudes and behaviors.

ALPS was designed to empower the stakeholders to manage, create, update, review, and approve documents associated with different processes. A global calendaring system was built in, allowing referencing by all the stakeholders to track the status of each of the processes, based on their pre-defined business rules and roles. A comprehensive process workflow is present as well.

ii also incorporated a robust search mechanism within ALPS to enable process/ document search based on pre-defined parameters. Finally, ALPS has a global dashboard at the International Secretariat, Regional, Country, and Development levels, incorporating the different and distinct processes that exist at each level.

Results

ii completed the project on time, on budget and as per its scope. ALPS, a global project accommodating varied user requirements, helped AAI in streamlining processes and improved transparency between organizational units. In providing easy access to processes and related documents, ALPS enables real time access to information.

ALPS is being extensively used by AAI users across 4 continents and 46 countries for managing their processes.

With ALPS, ii had the gratification of having developed a product that captured users’ imagination and also of being part of a noble cause. In working on this project, ii found a complementary partner as equally alive to social reality and obligations as we are. And what did AAI have to say about us? “Technical excellence, responsiveness, ability to deliver, ability to understand our domain which is quite different from other commercial organizations.” -Tarun Bhatnagar

About ii

iridium Interactive Limited (ii) specializes in providing online business solutions. With a presence across three continents, it has been at the forefront in integrating strategy, design and technology to build unique and robust user-centric e-business solutions. At ii, a holistic approach is adopted towards complex business problems to arrive at a complete solution. ii’s talented team has worked on a variety of disciplines for a multitude of clients drawn from various industries, and has a number of award-winning works to its credit. ii offers it services in the areas of interactive marketing, web marketing, e-learning, enterprise consulting and web accessibility initiatives.

With a highly decentralized mode of operations and over 2,000 local partner organizations worldwide AAI needed an efficient way of tracking their internal processes and manage the process related documents centrally. Action Aid approached us with this requirement. Says CEO Sriram Bharatam –“What probably made them approach us was our social consciousness and confidence that we would not only understand the domain, but also work with a level of passion that matches theirs”.

Several meetings, discussions, brainstormings later we came up a solution– a Process flow management system for internal processes christened ALPS-Accountability, Learning and Planning System .

About ALPS: Alps is a framework that sets out the key accountability requirements, guidelines, and processes in Actionaid International-not only in terms of organizational processes for planning, monitoring, strategy formulation, learning, reviews and audit but also personal attitudes and behaviours, requires processes and ways of working that are crucial to supporting and strengthening ActionAid’s rights based work.

AAI Portal Architecture:The ALPS framework includes a set of processes, roles associated with the processes and documents attached with each process. A process(which could be a strategy or a review or an appraisal) is initiated and completed at a predefined frequency of intervals and associated documents which are drafted, updated, reviewed and approved by roles across different levels of the organization. The project is aimed to create a tracker by which processes are tracked and documents could be linked and accessed by stakeholders for the defined processes. 
The key features offered by the solution include :

• Global Calendar Functionality: Calendar is an aggregated view of all processes.Depending on access permissions of a user, relevant information is displayed through Calendar.Calendar has a Month View and Year View.  Apart from these two views, Calendar comes with filter options by Location, Function or Theme. An intersection of the calendar, where information is available is listed with a hyperlink to actual process view. Multiple processes can be listed within an intersection.
• Document Management:Empower the stakeholders to manage (Create, update, review, approve) documents associated with the process.
• Document search : A robust Search mechanism to enable process/document search based on pre-defined parameters.
• Process Work Flow : A comprehensive process workflow, which will alert/send reminders to stake holders associated with a process.
• Dashboard : A global dashboard at International secretariat level, Regional level, Country level and Development Authority level.
• User Module: The user module allows Admin to set permissions to users. Users benefit from being able to sign on because it associates content they create with their account and allows various permissions to be set for their roles. The user module supports user roles which can setup fine grained permissions allowing each role to do only what the administrator wants them to. Each user is assigned to one or more roles

ALPS helped AAI in streamlining processes and provided improved transperancy. ALPS is being extensively used by AAI users across 4 continents and 46 countries for managing the processes.

Through ALPS we had the gratification of having developed a product that captured users imagination and also of being part of a noble cause. Our understanding of the domain, responsiveness and involvement was greatly appreciated by the client .