In today’s development practices, the shift from traditional project management to strategic project management marks a profound evolution in how organizations perceive their role and engage in social transformation. This was the guiding spirit of a recent workshop on project management for civil society organizations (CSOs), which turned out to be more than a training. It was a moment of strategic repositioning. While conventional project management often revolves around administering tasks, timelines, and resources, project management in the broader sense implies anticipation, strategic alignment, mobilization, and contextual awareness.
The very use of the word “management” was deliberate, and it catalyzed a reframing of how participants approached their work. Several CSO leaders expressed a strong desire to involve their teams more upstream in project design, no longer merely “responding to calls for proposals,” but constructing interventions grounded in actual needs and embedded in social realities. This shift signals a deeper ownership of the intervention logic by the actors themselves, fostering a collective responsibility toward long-term change.
One of the workshop’s key contributions was its focus on revisiting the origin of projects. Using powerful yet accessible tools such as the problem tree and solution tree, participants learned to distinguish surface symptoms from root causes. This analytical reorientation led many organizations to realize that some of their ongoing projects were addressing visible effects rather than tackling the structural issues at play. The exercise sparked immediate reflections and revisions in project formulation frameworks.
Another pivotal moment was the introduction of the theory of change. By compelling participants to articulate the assumptions behind their interventions and map the logical links between actions and expected outcomes, the approach enabled a meaningful elevation of thinking. It helped reconnect day-to-day activities with broader transformational goals, while incorporating a realistic reading of how change happens. Through hands-on exercises, participants simulated intervention models and identified, often for the first time, weak or missing links in the causal chains of their project designs
The logical framework, often seen as a donor-imposed constraint, was rehabilitated as a strategic tool, useful not only for external reporting but also for internal steering and coherence. By structuring the relationships between objectives, results, indicators, and activities, the framework became a backbone for coherent, measurable, and adaptable projects. Several CSOs used the opportunity to uncover inconsistencies in their current logical frameworks and began considering practical adjustments even before returning to their organizations.
What this experience subtly revealed is that the true power of a project lies not in its ability to fill out a template, but in its capacity to respond to a real issue with appropriate means, within a clear theory of transformation. A project ceases to be a technical answer; it becomes a strategic lever for action, a tool for change, a space for meaning.
In this way, the workshop delivered far more than methodologies. It sparked a shift in mindset. And in the world of development, that may be the highest value any training can offer: helping organizations not only to better plan what they do, but more importantly, to better understand why they do it.
