Implementation and/or Delivery

The need for adequate resourcing of the SIAP IMU to ensure effectiveness and sustainability in light of extensive reporting requirements imposed by the SIAP Steering Committee.

Identifying sequenced delivery dates when there are numerous output targets is helpful to ensure on-time completion of the TA project. This TA project was highly complex given the many topics and agencies involved. Planning out, and meeting, the sequenced activity plans appeared to be helpful in keeping the TA project on track.

When there are diverse TA outputs to deliver, the use of individual consultants can be more efficient than the use of a single firm. Engaging a single firm to cover the wide range of outputs in this TA project would have been time_x005F_x0002_consuming, both to identify the firm and to achieve the appointment of the firm, which would have reduced the time available to deliver the TA project components.

Agreed. The soliciting of stakeholder buy-in and support is an important aspect of project design, implementation, and delivery. A proper understanding of the demands being made on local players to provide information and any cultural issues with information sharing can help to develop buy-in to facilitate smooth project facilitation. At times, incentives may be required to assist local players to overcome barriers to cooperation.

The trade facilitation component was relatively more challenging to implement mainly because it requires the government agencies to conduct additional data surveys over and above their regular workload. The recommendations tend to be related to institutional, policy and regulatory measures, which are traditionally more difficult to influence and change as compared to providing assistance in physical infrastructure.

Flexible umbrella TA projects allow for the projects to be opportunistic and take on new initiatives, but there could be implementation challenges and time delays. This also means that not all results may be known at TA project completion. For instance, the subproject on future cities was included through additional TASF resources, but this also required extension and the procurement of additional consultancy services. Although work progressed in the three pilot cities, it is not clear whether this was taken up by the respective governments by the end of the TA project.

Sequencing of activities can help to progress implementation. For example, early capacity development and analytical work can help to speed up disbursement, while use of knowledge and evidence comes at a later stage in implementation.

The political economy is a key consideration and can result in significant delays especially if counterpart capacity is low.

To avoid risk of failure, an umbrella TA should balance out the risk in the portfolio between highly innovative yet risky activities and those with firm disbursement schedules.

It is important to keep a good balance between the subprojects or activities that are innovative but riskier and those that have firm disbursement schedules, so that the risk of TA implementation failure would be minimized. Subprojects to work with cities or municipalities turned out to be unpredictable, driven significantly by the political economy situation of the counterpart and are likely to face delays.