Open organizational report: Strengths and challenges for 2i2c's team

Over the last several months 2i2c has been working with an organizational consulting group called Difference Digital to help us identify the major opportunities and challenges in our organizational structure and strategy. The result of this work is a report that describes in detail the major strengths, weaknesses, challenges, and opportunities that 2i2c faces. It also recommends major actions to take as an organization.

2i2c values organizational transparency and a willingness to be honest about where you’re struggling. Stress is a natural part of both individuals and organizations, and should be embraced with the goal of learning and improving. Moreover, as a young organization 2i2c has benefitted heavily from the documents and learning that other organizations have made publicly available. We wouldn’t be where we are without building on the backs of others who are willing to share what they’ve learned.

So, we are making this organizational audit and report public for anyone to see. We hope that it provides transparency into 2i2c’s current status, and that it serves as a useful resource for other non-profits that are growing and facing similar challenges.

Here’s a link to the report on Zenodo .

For more background on this report, check out the short description below.

In April of this year we had our first in-person team meeting. We were excited and grateful to have the opportunity to speak to each other face-to-face. We also learned that many people on our team were stressed out! Our service had grown slow-but-steadily over the previous year, and we were feeling the tension that comes with growing your partnerships without significantly changing your team’s capacity or structure.

So, we decided to work with an organizational consulting group called makeadifference.digital to help us identify where we need to make improvements. They spent several weeks having one-on-one conversations with each member of the team, as well as doing a broader organizational analysis and comparison to other technical organizations at a similar stage of their lifecycle.

The result of this work was a report that outlines the major opportunities and strengths, as well as challenges and gaps in capacity, that our team currently faces. It makes a number of recommendations for how we should shift our practices, and importantly it also notes that the only way to gain that capacity is by hiring for new people and skills.

Here’s a link to the report on Zenodo .

The immediate result of this work is that we currently have three jobs posted:

• A Product Lead role to help us build a “product function” within 2i2c’s team.
• A Delivery Manager / Chief of Staff role to oversee and manage 2i2c’s system of work.
• A cloud and operations engineering role to grow our cloud engineering team’s capacity in serving communities.

Our next steps are to fill these positions, and to then begin the work of implementing many of the recommendations that are contained in the report. We’re confident that this is a natural part of being a small and growing organization, and we are grateful for the expertise of makeadifference.digital in guiding us through this work.

Note: if you’d like to work with makeadifference.digital , you can reach out to them at hello@makeadifference.digital .