Organizational Capacity Assessment Facilitator's Guide

A full length book on how to assess an organisation before you try to change it. It builds a framework covering performance, capacity, motivation and external environment, and shows how to turn the findings into decisions.

Lusthaus, Adrien, Anderson, Carden and Montalvan

The profile the United Nations uses to define what an effective department looks like. It gives departments a shared language for performance and a way to assess where they currently stand.

United Nations Office of Human Resources Management

A comparison of the assessment tools available and how to pick the right one. It also describes what a good assessment experience actually feels like for the organisation being assessed, which most tool manuals skip.

Informing Change

A course unit on diagnosing an organisation before intervening. It lists the subsystems and processes worth examining, the perspectives you can analyse them from, and the methods for each.

Indira Gandhi National Open University

A short guide to running a capacity assessment with a local partner organisation, from setting the purpose to scoring and agreeing on next steps. Written for health programmes but the method transfers.

Management Sciences for Health