Capacity Building - Capacity Building and Opportunity Management

Capacity Building and Opportunity Management

Opportunity Management may be defined as "a process to identify business and community development opportunities that could be implemented to sustain or improve the local economy,". When driving capacity building initiatives, opportunity management may help to target resources. The opportunity management process will firstly help identify the opportunity for improvement - a challenge that will be addressed by the capacity building initiative. Likewise, criteria will be developed and applied to proposed capacity building initiatives evaluate the effectiveness of the alternatives, and select an option for the driving phase. During the driving phase of the capacity building initiative, leads are assigned, accountability is established, action plans are developed, and project management may be utilized. Once the driving stage has reached fruition, constant monitoring of the capacity building initiative is required to make a decision to:

• Advance
• Rework
• or kill the initiative

If it determined in the monitoring phase that the initiative is not meeting the objectives outlined in the criteria of the evaluating and prioritizing stage, then the initiative will either need to be reworked - often requiring additional resources, or killed - meaning the end of the initiative. Following opportunity management guidelines, it is often effective to end or rework an initiative before excessive resources are waisted on a strategy that has proven not to work.