Inter-American Development Bank
facebook
twitter
youtube
linkedin
instagram
Abierto al públicoBeyond BordersCaribbean Development TrendsCiudades SosteniblesEnergía para el FuturoEnfoque EducaciónFactor TrabajoGente SaludableGestión fiscalGobernarteIdeas MatterIdeas que CuentanIdeaçãoImpactoIndustrias CreativasLa Maleta AbiertaMoviliblogMás Allá de las FronterasNegocios SosteniblesPrimeros PasosPuntos sobre la iSeguridad CiudadanaSostenibilidadVolvamos a la fuente¿Y si hablamos de igualdad?Home
Citizen Security and Justice Creative Industries Development Effectiveness Early Childhood Development Education Energy Envirnment. Climate Change and Safeguards Fiscal policy and management Gender and Diversity Health Labor and pensions Open Knowledge Public management Science, Technology and Innovation  Trade and Regional Integration Urban Development and Housing Water and Sanitation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to secondary menu
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer

Abierto al público

  • HOME
    • About this blog 
    • Editorial guidelines
  • CATEGORIES
    • Knowledge Management
    • Open Data
    • Open Learning
    • Open Source
    • Open Systems
  • Authors
  • English
    • Español

Operations Day – What we learned from Barbados

October 21, 2022 by David Zepeda Leave a Comment


4 min. read.

What are IDB Operations Days?

Operations Days are an integral part of BIDAcademy, the knowledge and learning platform of the IDB Group. The main objective of these Days is to create a space for collaboration and constructive dialogue among Project Executing Units (PEUs) within a particular country or sector, in order to share knowledge and experiences that address cross-cutting execution challenges that impact IDB projects.

Development projects are complex endeavors, and many of the challenges that our teams face are intertwined, not isolated from each other. Regardless of the differences in contexts, countries, or sectors, these challenges have common denominators that affect project implementation, including processes, financial terms, scope, and timeline, to name a few. The IDB’s Knowledge, Innovation, and Communication Sector (KIC) conceived of this initiative as a way to strengthen the accompaniment offered by the IDB to its counterparts and progressively strengthen the operational excellence that we strive for in terms of transparency, effectiveness, and efficiency.

The core of an Operations Day consists of a 2-to-3-day workshop where PEUs in a country from one or more sectors work on pre-identified challenges and cocreate potential short- and medium-term solutions. This happens during dynamic fast-paced sessions where knowledge sharing is prioritized and ideation is the name of the game. The main output of the workshop is one action plan per project, detailing specific short-term activities that each team will work on, based on the challenges that were analyzed and the collective conclusions that project teams reached while working together.

Paraguay, Bahamas, Brazil, Ecuador, and Honduras are just some of the countries that hosted an Operations Day workshop in the past. In these countries the challenges for which executing agencies cocreated potential actionable solutions ranged from topics related to environmental safeguards to fiscal procedures, from project management skills to institutional bottlenecks, and many more in between.

Operations Day in Barbados

At the end of September a total of nine projects from Barbados had participated in a virtual version of the Operations Day methodology to address two key cross-cutting challenges that where affecting Barbados’ portfolio:

  • Procurement processes
  • Strategic communications

At first glance, these areas may seem too general or distant from a PEU standpoint. This is precisely one of the main elements that is stressed during the workshop though, ensuring that the energy and effort spent will focus on actions that the project teams have control or influence over, and not on external circumstances that fall outside of their sphere of action. In Barbados we introduced the term “marginal gains” to serve as our guiding light throughout the exercise. No matter how slow progress may seem, or how small an action may be perceived, it’s extremely valuable if it’s a step forward in the right direction. When we start the ideation process, we don’t look to develop complicated or fancy solutions. On the contrary, from the get-go we know those are impossible to achieve in a short time span, so instead we prefer to focus on practical solutions and keep it simple at the beginning, and progressively move towards more complicated grounds.

Lessons worth sharing

Overall, Barbados taught us that there is a strong will to overcome multidimensional hurdles and make procurement processes more efficient, and that Agile methodologies are adaptable to specific contexts, meaning that a one-size-fits-all approach is not always the answer. We learned from Barbados:

  • The importance of systematizing and sharing lessons learned so that other teams have a head start while engaging in complicated processes
  • The value of recognizing the difference between reporting for the sake of reporting and sharing resourceful information for decision making purposes
  • That strategic communications to key stakeholders should not be an afterthought: How well we communicate (or not) can build or break a project
  • Finally, we witnessed the power of peer-to-peer learning and how, in this case, more minds do work better than one

By David Zepeda, knowledge and learning specialist at the IDB.


Filed Under: Knowledge Management Tagged With: Lessons Learned

David Zepeda

Licenciado en Relaciones Internacionales y Comercio Internacional por la Universidad Francisco Marroquín en Ciudad de Guatemala, con Maestría en Políticas Públicas de Korean Development Institute en Seúl, Corea del Sur. David cuenta con una Certificación de Gestión de Proyectos por la Universidad de Georgetown, Washington D.C.; es Project Management Professional (PMP) por el Project Management Institute (PMI) y certificado Scrum Master. Se unió al Banco Interamericano de Desarrollo en el año 2011 para trabajar en el Sector de Conocimiento y Aprendizaje. Luego de una consultoría en el ala privada del Banco Mundial, regresa al BID a trabajar con Unidades Ejecutoras en los países, en el área de gestión de proyectos y hoy en día es Especialistas de Conocimiento y Aprendizaje en el sector de Conocimiento, Innovación y Comunicaciones de la misma institución.

Reader Interactions

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Primary Sidebar

Follow Us

Subscribe

About this blog

Open knowledge can be described as information that is usable, reusable, and shareable without restrictions due to its legal and technological attributes, enabling access for anyone, anywhere, and at any time worldwide.

In the blog 'Abierto al Público,' we explore a wide range of topics, resources, and initiatives related to open knowledge on a global scale, with a specific focus on its impact on economic and social development in the Latin American and Caribbean region. Additionally, we highlight the Inter-American Development Bank's efforts to consistently disseminate actionable open knowledge generated by the organization.

Search

Topics

Access to Information Actionable Resources Artificial Intelligence BIDAcademy Big Data Citizen Participation Climate Change Code for Development Coronavirus Creative Commons Crowdsourcing Data Analysis Data Journalism Data Privacy Data Visualization Development projects Digital Badges Digital Economy Digital Inclusion Entrepreneurship Events Gender and Diversity Geospatial Data Hackathons How to Instructional Design Key Concepts Knowledge Products Lessons Learned Methodologies MOOC Most Read Natural Language Processing Numbers for Development Open Access Open Government Open Innovation Open Knowledge Open Science Solidarity Sustainable Development Goals Taxonomy Teamwork Text Analytics The Publication Station

Similar Posts

  • The Legacy of the Superheroes of Development
  • Operations Day: Sharing experiences to achieve greater impact
  • As a leader in Environmental and Social Safeguards, what would you do?
  • IDB endorses Principles for Digital Development
  • What can we learn from our Development Superheroes?

Footer

Banco Interamericano de Desarrollo
facebook
twitter
youtube
youtube
youtube

    Blog posts written by Bank employees:

    Copyright © Inter-American Development Bank ("IDB"). This work is licensed under a Creative Commons IGO 3.0 Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives. (CC-IGO 3.0 BY-NC-ND) license and may be reproduced with attribution to the IDB and for any non-commercial purpose. No derivative work is allowed. Any dispute related to the use of the works of the IDB that cannot be settled amicably shall be submitted to arbitration pursuant to the UNCITRAL rules. The use of the IDB's name for any purpose other than for attribution, and the use of IDB's logo shall be subject to a separate written license agreement between the IDB and the user and is not authorized as part of this CC- IGO license. Note that link provided above includes additional terms and conditions of the license.


    For blogs written by external parties:

    For questions concerning copyright for authors that are not IADB employees please complete the contact form for this blog.

    The opinions expressed in this blog are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the IDB, its Board of Directors, or the countries they represent.

    Attribution: in addition to giving attribution to the respective author and copyright owner, as appropriate, we would appreciate if you could include a link that remits back the IDB Blogs website.



    Privacy Policy

    Copyright © 2025 · Magazine Pro on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in

    Banco Interamericano de Desarrollo

    Aviso Legal

    Las opiniones expresadas en estos blogs son las de los autores y no necesariamente reflejan las opiniones del Banco Interamericano de Desarrollo, sus directivas, la Asamblea de Gobernadores o sus países miembros.

    facebook
    twitter
    youtube
    This site uses cookies to optimize functionality and give you the best possible experience. If you continue to navigate this website beyond this page, cookies will be placed on your browser.
    To learn more about cookies, click here
    x
    Manage consent

    Privacy Overview

    This website uses cookies to improve your experience while you navigate through the website. Out of these, the cookies that are categorized as necessary are stored on your browser as they are essential for the working of basic functionalities of the website. We also use third-party cookies that help us analyze and understand how you use this website. These cookies will be stored in your browser only with your consent. You also have the option to opt-out of these cookies. But opting out of some of these cookies may affect your browsing experience.
    Necessary
    Always Enabled
    Necessary cookies are absolutely essential for the website to function properly. This category only includes cookies that ensures basic functionalities and security features of the website. These cookies do not store any personal information.
    Non-necessary
    Any cookies that may not be particularly necessary for the website to function and is used specifically to collect user personal data via analytics, ads, other embedded contents are termed as non-necessary cookies. It is mandatory to procure user consent prior to running these cookies on your website.
    SAVE & ACCEPT