Essential Policy Skills - Training Series 2012

Essential Policy Skills - Training Series 2012.

Key Topics

• Managing policy projects
  
  • Membership selection
  • The logic of teamwork
  • Assigning tasks and clarifying process steps
  • Clarifying team goals and aligning incentives
  • The planning process
  • Elements of team communication
  • Setting Milestones
  • Creating a Task List or Work Breakdown Structure (WBS)
  • Assigning people to tasks
  • Estimating task duration
  • Compiling the baseline project plan
  • Project budgeting
  • The virtues of doing things fast
  • Improving task duration estimates
  • Or network diagram
  • Creating a Program Evaluation and Review Technique (PERT) chart
  • Using project management to integrate the stages of policy development
  • Connecting policy development to project management
  • Assessing tasks, activities and work requirements
  • How to work effectively with others to promote sound policy solutions
  • Managing multiple projects
  • Allocating resources appropriately and in a timely manner
  • Ways to shorten the overall duration of a project
  • Identifying the critical path of the project
  • Resource levelling
• Effective Policy Analysis and Development
  
  • Key relations of the policy officer / analyst
  • The role of policy analysis in society and challenges that impede effective policy analysis
  • The relative strengths and weaknesses of individual versus collective decision-making
  • Modelling individual choice and market processes
  • Thinking in terms of efficiency, equity, and administrative simplicity
  • Reviewing things governments can do
  • Comprehensive problem and solution analysis
  • Comparing policy instruments and developing outcomes matrices
  • Benefit-cost analysis
  • Comparative institutional analysis
  • Environmental and social impact assessment
  • Program evaluation
  • Gender and race analysis