Literacy Basics - Community Literacy of Ontario

Assessing Your Internal Environment

Internal Assessment

A literacy agency exists to fulfill a particular mission and to provide particular services in a particular way. Its success greatly depends on certain strengths within the agency itself. To assess your agency's strengths and weaknesses, you will need to look closely at the internal environment, i.e. everything contained within the walls of the organization. The objective is to gather information that describes the agency in terms of the strengths and weaknesses of its resources, its current practices and strategies, and its performance. You want to know what you do that affects the agency's success and failure. To that end, you want good data on what you have in the way of resources, what the agency does, and how well it carries out day-to-day operations.

An agency's internal resources include the people it hires, its revenue, the information it has access to and uses, its physical facility, the programs and services it offers, and the working environment or workplace culture.

Every agency has unique strategies and particular ways of operating its programs and services. Examples include: policies and procedures that guide decision-making, practices followed for daily operations, how program services are delivered, how planning occurs, how professional development takes place, how programs and services are marketed and how the agency connects with key stakeholders including the local community. All of these practices must also be examined with an eye to inherent strengths and weaknesses.

You will want to look at the agency's record of achievement. An agency's history is an important piece of the puzzle and continues to influence the agency's current operations. You will want some data on the agency's past record of success as well as information on challenges it continues to face year after year.

Be aware that some of the information that comes back to you will be very concrete in nature (for example, statistics) and easily verified (i.e., the number of computers available for learners) but other data will reflect the opinions, values, preferences and prejudices of the participants. Obviously, that information is much more subjective in nature and not so easily substantiated. Do not be dismayed by this as both forms of information have real value. Learning how the inner workings of your agency are actually perceived by stakeholders can let you see how certain changes could lead to significant improvements.

Specifically, you want to find out:

1. What agency resources, skills and abilities help the agency accomplish its mission
2. What gaps, deficiencies or weaknesses hold the agency back or have a detrimental effect on success

Basically, you will bring those two questions to bear on various aspects of your organization's internal environment. For example:

Internal resources: You want to know about the strengths and weaknesses you have with regard to your staff (not their individual, personal strengths and weaknesses but professional competencies - what they as a resource bring to the agency), funding, access to and use of information, the location and design of the physical facility, other resources that are available to the program, and the overall workplace culture.

Current strategies: You want to learn about strengths and weaknesses with regard to how the agency operates in the day-to-day work of running the agency. You want to gather evidence of strengths and weaknesses in the agency's policies and procedures, daily program delivery, practitioner support, local coordination of services, and program outreach and marketing. Much of this information is available from your agency program monitoring reports and visits.

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