Getting The Most Out Of Capactity Manager

The Importance of Managing Overheads

The principle of Full Cost Recovery (FCR) is that in general “Overheads are GOOD”.

The existence of overheads is an indicator of quality, and at the right level they make the difference between strategic and crisis management, and a good or poor quality service for your own organisation and those you support.

The fundamental message for funders is that ideally they should always adequately fund capacity and infrastructure because it has a crucial role to play in facilitating effective service delivery.

However, it is essential that every organisation's infrastructure should be fit for purpose. The question then becomes how do we know whether our infrastructure is effective?

As a Senior Manager, the expectation that you should know everything about your organisation's service delivery, whilst also being an expert in a wide range of professional support disciplines, is unrealistic.

The output from the research is therefore the production of a diagnostic tool which can be used by CEOs to consider all the main overhead categories likely to be needed by small to medium voluntary sector enterprises.

It is, however, to understand that the Capacity Manager's real value is in the process of allocating time to thinking about each of your overhead expenditure categories.

How Best To Use Capacity Manager

There are two key approaches to using Capacity Manager.

One option is to work within the organisation; either with the CEO working alone, working together as a management team, or delegating the process to functional and departmental teams.

An alternative approach is to work with support from outside the organisation, for example by two or more CEOs working collectively in a peer to peer setting or facilitated by support workers or consultants.

There are likely to be some differences in results between a CEO working alone, working in conjunction with others, and again if working with additional external facilitation. For example, working in pairs or groups will take longer, but is likely to provide additional insights and/or scrutiny.

For maximum effectiveness, and whether working alone or in a group, the Capacity Manager does require a good degree of honest reflection. Our best advice is that you should consider taking a couple of hours out of the office to complete the Capacity Manager in its entirety. (It is designed, however, so that you can use it to consider each of the overhead categories separately.)

You will also need to consider confidentiality and the degree to which you are prepared to share sensitive information.

Organisations may also find it very useful for their non-management front-line staff to complete all or some elements of the Capacity Manager, in order for senior management and trustees to guage and compare how, where and why staff may perceive their organisation differently from themselves.