New Project: USAID

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Title: Modernizing USAID's Relationship Management Approach
Subtitle: Developing a holistic Agency-wide system that enables USAID to manage its relationships with the private sector more consistently, effectively and at scale.

About USAID:
The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) plays an essential role in United States (U.S.) foreign policy. The Agency represents the U.S. abroad by working to establish a self-sustaining and continually improving living environment and to fairly and equitably distribute humanitarian assistance to those nations working to recover from disaster, escape poverty, or engage in democratic reforms. USAID also serves the interests of the U.S. and host nations by providing assistance in agriculture, democracy and governance, economic growth, the environment, education, health, global partnerships, and humanitarian aid. USAID operates in more than 80 countries, working to achieve U.S. foreign policy objectives.

USAID manages strategic relationships with a variety of external entities that span multiple projects, geographies, and operating units. Managing these relationships has become an increasingly mission-critical Agency function. In recent years, USAID has formalized public-private partnerships (PPPs) worth billions of dollars with more than 4,000 different private sector entities, and the Agency is actively engaged in discussions with hundreds more at any given time.

The Challenge:
To manage relationships with external stakeholders, the Agency presently relies on a patchwork of unconnected systems, standards, and business processes across different initiatives and operating units worldwide. In the absence of a common enterprise-wide relationship management system, individual Bureaus, Independent Offices, and Missions (B/IO/Ms) have begun to build their own tools, compounding the problem. This improvised approach creates significant burdens on both individual staff and the Agency as a whole, and the resulting information silos contribute to fragmented engagement with key external partners, information barriers, and duplicative work for USAID staff.

For example, the lack of visibility across the Agency on the breadth and depth of USAID's engagement, particularly with high-profile global partners, makes it difficult for USAID to proactively manage these strategic relationships. The inability of staff to easily share due diligence and risk management information across B/IO/Ms results in duplicative work for USAID staff and opens the door to reputational risks and other potential liabilities for USAID. And, the lack of a single system to facilitate aggregated reporting about the Agency’s portfolio of partnership activities makes it difficult for USAID to tell its story to Congress or the public.

Likewise, the lack of consistent or standardized business processes related to relationship management creates an inconsistent and confusing experience for our external partners. Staff and partners often remark that ‘the right hand’ of USAID frequently doesn’t know what ‘the left hand’ is doing, putting Agency staff and leadership in untenable situations with external partners.

At the core of USAID's strategy is a common digital platform that will establish a single source of truth using a singular enterprise-wide data model and standard engagement workflows and processes to catalog composite global profiles of USAID’s strategic partner relationships and partnership activities worldwide, and provide the Agency with rich reporting and dashboarding capabilities, all in a secure, compliant manner.
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This global relationship management platform will function as a foundational first step towards a much broader ECRM program. Once the core platform and the first use case are implemented, USAID anticipates that a variety of additional applications or products will be developed to support other needs and use cases across the Agency. Accordingly, the relationship management platform, and the Agency’s guidelines and governance structures, must be developed with this future state in mind.

The ECRM program will support the President's Management Agenda Priority 2, and improve the “customer experience” (CX) for our partners, by reducing burdens, redesigning key elements of the collaboration process, and streamlining the pathways to partnership with USAID. Likewise, the White House’s February 2021 Memorandum on Revitalizing America’s Foreign Policy and National Security Workforce, Institutions, and Partnerships stipulates that Agencies represented on the National Security Council, such as USAID, shall establish “mechanisms to coordinate, prioritize, and deconflict intra-agency partner outreach, in order to understand and optimize all of the agency’s partner interactions.” The Agency aspires for the ECRM program to be seen as a flagship example of fulfilling these government-wide mandates. ****