Traditionally funding works whereby an organisation, often a Council or other government body, puts together a bid to a funding body. The funding body will look at the sketch of a plan to decide whether it will fund further research into the initial idea, often called phase 1 or stage 1 funding.
From this, the organisation is then expected to produce a detailed project plan with budgets, outcomes, specific timescales etc. Usually the time and resources allocated to this first phase is limited.
This traditional approach accommodates the traditional idea of how a project is run – it is linear, top down and assumes that the applicant has all the answers.
How to avoid a White Elephant
If we are to avoid the delivery of “white elephants” in the future, we need to embrace service design thinking and agile development into the application process. Proper service design is front end heavy – what I mean by this is that the investment in time and resources at the beginning of the project are larger than if you were to launch straight into the project full throttle. The rewards are worth the initial investment because ultimately the outcome of the project will be the delivery of something that the citizens want and need for their local area, not what the bureaucrats sitting in County Hall or the Town Hall think they want.
In order for this to work funders need to be comfortable with ambiguity and develop trust with the organisations they are looking to fund. Rather than focussing on specific outcomes in the application process, they should reward applicants who propose to properly engage (not consult) with people in the locality and not just at the outset, but all the way through the process.
They should look to organisations who have an understanding of agile development whereby an idea is prototyped, evaluated, improved and tested again using iterative loops.
This would be a far less risky approach to project funding than the current linear approach and would avoid the risk of delivering a “white elephant”.
Service Design – Double Diamond
Agile Development – Iterative Loop