Project management

Operational partnerships between two organisations are a practical approach to humanitarian responses. MSF considers such partnerships when the objective it is pursuing in a country is similar to that of an existing national organisation, and when there is potential for synergy between these two entities. I would like to take a bit of a detour by looking at an experience that is in some ways similar: when Che Guevara tried to lead the revolution in Congo - Zaire by supporting the organisation of the guerrilla movement in the east of the country.

In our first interview, Marion Péchayre discussed a variety of management-related problems at Médecins Sans Frontières: working in silos, the ever-growing number of management tools for monitoring, the endless validation requests, the vanishing role of the individual in favour of pseudoscientific presentations of events and projects, etc. This interview, conducted by Elba Rahmouni, focuses on solutions to these problems and hypotheses on how to improve our ways of working. Rather than offering set recipes, Marion Péchayre advocates an approach based on “practical wisdom” (a concept from the sociology of professions) and deliberative management that every individual and team can apply in their own way. 

In this interview, different issues related to management at MSF are broached with Marion Péchayre, Director of Studies at the CRASH, such as the fragmentation of different components of our work, professionalisation drifting towards an attitude of control as embodied by the multiplication of management tools and the omnipresence of requests for validation, and the devaluation of the role of the individual against the promotion of a pseudo-scientific presentation of facts and projects.

We’d like to share with you today some recommended reading around the issue of management, work, and ways of working. This choice will probably surprise some regular CRASH readers; isn’t this a far cry from the usual subjects of our critical analysis? Far from being chosen at random, the selection that follows in reality grew out of several years of reading.