"...our organisation implicitly values misguided effort above well planned achievement..."

We're struggling to finalise our new global project document templates. I've endlessly argued that field staff need useful planning and management tools. In addition, I acknowledge that the organisation needs a usable funding proposal format.

In my opinion, one perpetual problem we endure is having no globally responsible Operations Manager who understands development principles alongside extensive field experience. Instead, we have allowed our financial wizards to control all globally relevant processes.

In practice it means that whilst notional effort has been put into writing a proposal template which simultaneously helps with project planning and management, in fact it improves little on the latter; or at least its marginal improvements pale into insignificance compared to the sea-change I'd prefer.

I'm left feeling that the consultant has not lifted my burden (draft version 5 but still predominantly only tinkering with our old format); now I have the prospect of designing my own project planning and management tools and selling staff the global forms simply as donor application forms: a somewhat distasteful but necessary linctus. (In fact, where we channel funds from a government donor to one of our projects, we're happy for our projects to use the donor-supplied format and simply fill in the Summary section of our own global template; I'll be sorely tempted to do the same for our own projects which utilise our maybe-to-be-designed local planning forms.)

Doubtless I will once again be labelled too pushy by colleagues. Or maybe I really am trying to push to improve too far too fast? But it seems to me that our organisation implicitly values misguided effort above well planned achievement. All rather frustrating, not least because I think our organisation lags significantly behind what COULD quite reasonably be achieved...