MFI Tackles Management Issues: Nicaragua
Duke University graduate student Tucker Nielsen, who became a management consultant through the USAID funded Institute of International Education's Emerging Markets Development Advisors Program (EMDAP), recounts his experience assisting Pro Mujer Nicaragua in increasing its managerial efficiency, through this Note from the Field.
EMDAP initially chose Nielsen to increase employee productivity via the improvement of the institution's human resources policies. Nielsen first found that Pro Mujer Nicaragua had a talented and eager management team and employees, but that the following inefficiencies were not allowing the company's skills to be used appropriately:
- The MFI spent excessive amounts of management time on administrative tasks;
- It had rapid staff turn-over;
- It put employees through an insufficient evaluation process.
Therefore, Nielsen and the team did the following:
- Created a more systematized candidate selection process;
- Decreased the management team's time spent on administrative tasks and increased its time spent on developing new products, studying markets, and promoting the program, by hiring people according to administrative needs, and reorganizing the internal structure of the institution;
- Revised the employee evaluation procedure.
The note lists the lessons learned as:
- Systems and frameworks are essential but ineffective if employees do not receive appropriate training;
- Analysis of internal procedure, interviews with employees, and process mapping are necessary to better understand the roots of problems and come up with solutions;
- Understanding that the solution to one problem could create another problem is necessary; therefore, assessing trade-offs is important.
