Pro Bono O.R. - some important information

I have a few requests as well as some important information to pass on.

Firstly the South West O.R. group (part of The OR Society) has asked if Pro Bono O.R. would give a talk at one of its events in late Feb/early March.  As well as giving an overview of the scheme I am looking for a couple of volunteers who could talk for 15 minutes about why they joined the scheme and about a project they are working on/have worked on (what they have/are doing) and the impact it has.  The event will be in Cardiff at 5:45pm on either a Tuesday or Wednesday.  Please let me know by the end of November if you'd be interested (travel expenses will be covered).  

Additionally The OR Society has other Regional Society Groups across the country as well as Special Interest Groups (SIGS) who would be interested to hear from volunteers, please get in touch if you would be happy to present at one of these groups (pleased note you do not need to be a member of The OR Society).

Secondly I have created a LinkedIn group for volunteers and those interested in Pro Bono O.R. https://www.linkedin.com/grp/home?gid=8422271&trk=my_groups-tile-grp Please do sign up, the purpose of the group is to provide a space for updates, discussion, support, advice and to for members to post relevant information.

Thirdly please do share the news about Pro Bono O.R., both to analytical professionals who might want to get involved and to third sector organisations you may have connections with.  We just completed our 40^th project this week and the scheme continues to go from strength to strength.  If you do have connections with a third sector organisation who you think would benefit from Pro Bono O.R. support please do get in touch and I can pass on an information pack.


Lastly, I’d just like to say a big thank you for your continued support of the scheme. The feedback I get from both volunteers and the organisations we work with is overwhelmingly positive – the time you give really does make a huge difference!

Current Pro Bono O.R. projects requiring volunteers #ORblog

Dear volunteer,

Please find details of a new project below.  I have provided a brief summary below and then provided a link to the detailed project scope.

Oxfordshire Advocacy

I

nformation about the organisation:

Charitable objectives: To provide a free, confidential and independent advocacy service.

Main activities of the organisation: Advocacy support delivered by trained volunteers and part time staff.

Project summary:

Project: To review how they measure outcomes of advocacy cases and thus their effectiveness, impact and outcomes.

Time commitment: approx. 5 days

Location:  Initial meeting in Oxford, then home based.

Please read the detailed project proposal and if you feel you are able to offer your assistance please complete the application form and return to me along with your CV by midday on Wednesday 6^th May.

Please note the projects below were advertised last (I have attached all the details again for your consideration)

Streatham Youth and Community Trust 

Information about the organisation:

Area of benefit: To improve the lives of children, young people and vulnerable adults through delivery of services, activities and projects

Charitable objectives: Reduce social isolation; increase confidence and self-esteem; empower young people and their families; Develop strong relationships and communities

Main activities: Youth clubs; Homework Clubs; Adult Support Groups; Room Hire

Project summary (1):

Project: Engaging with a marginalised community - Engaging with a marginalised group of clients/users and non-users

Time commitment: approx. 5 days

Location:  Mix of remote and onsite working (London)

Please read the detailed project proposal and if you feel you are able to offer your assistance please complete the application form and return to me along with your CV by midday on Wednesday 29^th April.

Project summary (2):

Project: Planning Business Improvement - Assessing currency of priorities, gaps in service delivery, options for improvement and new/innovative services to feed into a new business plan including the financial impact of change

Time commitment: approx. 20 days

Location:  Mix of remote and onsite working (London)

Please read the detailed project proposal and if you feel you are able to offer your assistance please complete the application form and return to me along with your CV by midday on Wednesday 29^th April.

Please specify on your application which project you are applying for.

These projects are suitable for an individual, a pair or a team of analysts.  Additionally if you would like to work on a project with the support of a mentor please do specify in your application and we can offer the required support.

If you are interested in working on a project but cannot meet the deadline specified please do register your interest in the first instance before the deadline.

If you require any further information please do not hesitate to get in touch.

I look forward to hearing from you and once again thank you for your help and support.

Kind regards

Felicity McLeister

Felicity.mcleister@theorsociety.com

O.R. Pro Bono Project Manager

(Mon, Tue & Wed)
Direct Tel +44 (0)121 234 7826, Main Tel +44 (0)121 233 9300

If you are not already a member of The OR Society and are interested in joining please visit https://www.theorsociety.com/ or send an email to carol.smith@theorsociety.com

Additionally you may be interested in becoming a member of our Third Sector Special Interest Group (ORiTS). For more details visit:  https://www.theorsociety.com/Pages/SpecialInterest/ORThirdSector.aspx

Other webpages that may be of interest:

http://probonoor.blogspot.co.uk/

http://www.theorsociety.com/Pages/Probono/Probono.aspx
http://www.LearnAboutOR.co.uk
http://www.ScienceofBetter.co.uk

Pro Bono O.R. is here to help you!

Do any of these statements sound familiar:

• We have lots of different options for the future but it’s impossible to decide which to choose in such uncertain times.
• 
  
• We’re under huge pressure to do more with less, and we don’t know how we’re going to do it.
• 
  
• It’s hard to stay objective when we’re faced with such emotionally charged decisions.
• 
  
• We know we’re doing a good job – but how can we prove it?

If your answer was yes and you are a UK based, third sector organisation then get in touch to find out Pro Bono O.R. (a free consultancy service) could address these issues.

The OR Society launched its Pro Bono O.R. initiative for UK based third sector organisations in September 2013. The society wants more organisations to benefit from operational research and recognises that third sector organisations have an even greater need to reduce costs and increase efficiency and effectiveness.

No matter what size or at what stage your organisation is, no matter what kind of decision, problem, or opportunity you face, there’s probably a way for Pro Bono O.R. to help.

O.R. is about finding ways to apply analytical methods to make better decisions. Third Sector organisations face extremely complex decisions about the direction they should take and how to allocate scarce resources.  

To find out more and to request Pro Bono O.R. support please Pro Bono O.R. or email felicity.mcleister@theorsociety.com

Additionally if you would like to volunteer you time to work on projects then please do get in touch.

Pro Bono O.R. Christmas newsletter

The OR Society: Pro Bono O.R. (December 2014 newsletter - Issue 1)

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Thank you!

Well what a year 2014 has been for Pro Bono O.R.  Whether you are a volunteer analyst, an organisation who we have supported or a contact who supports or promotes the scheme, I want to say a big thank you from myself and all the staff at The OR Society, without your support we would not be where we are today.

The Beginning

Back in 2011 a few members of the society got together and decided to pilot a scheme to offer third sector organisations free consultancy to help to help reduce costs and improve utilisation of limited resources.  On the back of its success in September 2013 The OR Society launched its Pro Bono O.R. scheme.

Where we are now

Since Sept 2013 the scheme has completed 9 projects, has 15 active projects and a further 10 which are being scoped.  Below you can see some of the organisations we have worked with and are currently working with. We currently have over 200 volunteers across the UK and these range from retired professionals to analysts in their early career, consultants and others in the O.R./analytics profession who either volunteer in their own time, are given company time or a mixture of both.

Feedback

For me the best thing about this scheme is the real difference O.R. can make.  The feedback I receive from both the organisations and the volunteers has been overwhelmingly positive.

What the organisations say:

"We are enormously grateful for being able to benefit from the advice and support of such a knowledgeable and experienced professional, who was able to raise challenging issues in a sensitive and helpful way"

"We’ve benefited hugely from your work and support in all areas of the project, and from an organisational perspective you've enabled us to take a highly professional approach to

What the volunteers say:

"I’ve really enjoyed working with third sector organisations and found the staff extremely positive about the contribution we make"

"Working as a pro bono volunteer is a great way to contribute some professional expertise to some truly worthwhile causes.  The Third Sector is full of people who feel passionately about their Mission, so working with them is invariably a positive learning experience"

Finding out more

Click here to find out more about volunteering

Click here to find out how to receive support

Click here to see all the completed case studies

For further information please visit the webpage 

Best wishes and have a wonderful Christmas and a Happy New Year.

Felicity McLeister

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• Public Profile

Pro Bono O.R. - Recruiting new volunteers

As you may be aware The OR Society launched its O.R. Pro Bono initiative for UK based third sector organisations in September 2013. The society wants more organisations to benefit from operational research and recognises that third sector organisations have an even greater need to be more efficient.

The success of the scheme has outweighed our expectations.  In the first year we completed 7 projects, are currently working on 14 others and have more than 10 that are at the initial scoping stage.  The response from both the organisations and the volunteers has been overwhelmingly positive, the difference Pro Bono O.R. has made to some of the organisations in such a short space of time has been significant.  The volunteers have all provided 100% positive feedback having enjoyed the experience, learnt new skills, gained valuable experience working in another sector and made new connections.

The success of the scheme means we are now recruiting for more volunteers across the UK.  Signing up as a volunteer requires no commitment.  Volunteers receive emails about projects that require volunteers and then it is up to the volunteer whether to respond or not.  Volunteering can be done in individuals own time or as part of a company volunteer days (or a mix).  Projects can also be carried out by individuals, pairs or teams.  Mentoring and quality assurance roles are also required.

For more information on the project please visit: http://www.theorsociety.com/Pages/Probono/Probono.aspx.  To sing up to become a volunteer please take a few moments to complete the online volunteers details form: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/108mRcs8gPayP9plm-4n5VTmcS9sXL47SO5x-QKZvdkQ/viewform?embedded=true

For any queries please contact me directly.  Please pass this on to team members or anyone else in the O.R. profession who you think might be interested.

Thank you for your time and consideration.

Pro Bono O.R. making a difference

It's so rewarding to get such great feedback from the organisations Pro Bono O.R. works with.

Here is some feedback from two projects we've recently completed:

Fly2help

Fly2help is a small charity supporting families and individuals facing a wide range of trauma or tragedy and encouraging aerospace careers. 

The charity was about to embark on an expansion of its services and wanted reassurance about their plans.

When talking about their Pro Bono volunteer they said this: 'He was absolutely brilliant. He was able to review complex issues and get straight to the heart of what was going wrong. He was then really flexible and agreed to work with the Chair and myself to resolve our roles and move forward together.'

The Dachshund Breed Council

DBC is a community group that works with breed clubs and breeders to improve dogs’ health and welfare.  

The problem they faced was that some Miniature Wirehaired Dachshunds suffer from a form of epilepsy called Lafora Disease.  2 DNA tests are available, but are not yet used by all breeders. The DBC wanted a tool to help predict the probability of breeding puppies with Lafora Disease.

They said about their volunteer 'she clearly understood the problem we were trying to solve and came up with a tool (in Excel) which is easy for us to update each quarter as we get new test result data. She also kept the solution “simple” while keeping the options open should we manage to collect more sophisticated data in the future.' 

Could Pro Bono O.R. help you? Find out here

OR56 The OR Society annual conference

Only 3 weeks to go until #or56. A great place and a great conference for academics and practitioners. 

OR56 is a unique opportunity to develop your professional skills, build your knowledge of the latest developments, use other people’s experiences to spark your imagination, and meet, discuss and share with others in the field. 

24 STREAMS and around 200 presentations of interest to academics and practitioners alike, including for example, case studies and presentations in methodological areas such as simulation, analytics, forecasting, problem-structuring; and application areas such as health, public policy, third sector, and supply chain.

PRACTITIONERS – be they Analytics professionals, Data Scientists, Systems Engineers, Decision Supporters, or just plain analysts, a dedicated Making an Impact (MAI) day on Wednesday 10th September: focused sessions for consultants, analysts and decision makers – and anyone with a passion for making the world work more effectively.

PLENARY talks from : -
- Ursula Brennan (Permanent Secretary at the Ministry of Justice) 
- Andrew Jennings, (Senior Vice President and Chief Analytics Officer at FICO)
- Stewart Robinson, (Professor of Mgmt. Science at Loughborough University and President of the OR Society).

A DEBATE – Our first! “Is Good Enough Good Enough?”
Come and join a contest between optimisers and satisficers with Join Jacek Gondzio, Professor in the School of Mathematics, Edinburgh University and Konstantinos Katsikopoulos a senior researcher and associate professor at the Centre for Adaptive Behaviour and Cognition of the Max Planck Institute for Human Development.

PANEL DISCUSSION - On the emerging field of Behavioural OR. 
This plenary panel will try to help to shape a conceptual view of what ‘Behavioural Operational Research’ is, what it should be, and what its perspective can contribute to the theory and practice of OR.

There's still time to book  OR56

Pro Bono O.R. in the UK & Internationally (Conference talk by Graham Rand) at IFORS (Barcelona 2014)

A member of the Pro Bono steering group (Graham Rand) was invited to give a talk at the IFORS (International Federation of Operational Research Societies) conference in Barcelona (July 2014).  The talk looks at how Pro Bono O.R. is operated and looks at some case studies both in the UK and abroad.  Conference slides

On the back of this, Graham has been invited to the INFORMS (The Institute fr Operations Research and the Management Sciences) conference in San Francisco to deliver a similar talk.  INFORMS is the largest society in the world for professionals in the field of Operational Research, management science and analytics.

The value of LinkedIn for Third Sector organisations

Having recently read Alex Swallow's post on 'How LinkedIn changed my life' it really struck me how valuable LinkedIn has been for Pro Bono O.R. (Operational Research). It has helped me build up connections with people I would never have been able to otherwise and has enabled me to explain what O.R. is and how it is and can really benefit Third Sector organisations in the UK.

To then back this up I then received an email yesterday from Karen Weaver (CEO of HARCVS) who has written an article on how LinkedIn offers opportunities for charities:

Linking In offers opportunities for charities

'Volunteers find their way to charities via many routes and of course take on a wide
variety of roles. In recent years social media has become a valuable additional channel and HARCVS has just benefited from excellent support from a volunteer which commenced with LinkedIn.'

To find out how Karen discovered Pro Bono O.R. and how the project went please read the following article on pages 6-7: Care in Action Newsletter

Cranfield Trusts joins the debate: 'Are there too many charities?'

Interesting article from Amanda Tincknell, CEO of Cranfield Trust http://cranfieldtrust.org/article/2014/jul/1/are-there-too-many-charities

Read about the workshop at Evolve (one of the highest attended workshops of the day!)

How Operational Research can improve your organisation’s decision making

#Evolve 2014(Greater Manchester)

Pro Bono O.R. was invited to run a workshop at Evolve (Greater Manchester) 2014 which was hosted by GMCVO in partnership with NVCO.

The workshop was one of the highest attended workshops of the day and had extremely positive feedback.

Here’s a brief summary of what was covered:

The purpose of OR is to enable managers to make more effective decisions.  Those decisions could be strategic, tactical or extremely detailed issues. It may be appropriate to help in providing information through, for example, forecasting.  O.R can help through problem structuring, data gathering, modelling etc.  O.R. can be qualitative or quantitative or in many cases a combination of the two.

Some examples of Pro Bono projects were given before encouraging participants to consider the problems that their organisations faced that might be helped by O.R.

Third Sector organisations face extremely complex decisions about the direction they should take and how to allocate scarce resources. The OR Society wants more organisations to benefit from Operational Research and recognises that 3^rd sector organisations have an even greater need to be more efficient. 

 These are some of the problems third sector organisations are faced with:

•‘We have lots of different options for the future but it’s impossible to decide which to choose in such uncertain times.’

• ‘We’re under huge pressure to do more with less, and we don’t know how we’re going to do it.’

• ‘It’s hard to stay objective when we’re faced with such emotionally charged decisions.’

• ‘We know we’re doing a good job – but how can we prove it?’

The OR Society felt that O.R. could help and set up Pro Bono O.R.

After the workshop this is what some of the attendees said:

‘I came to this workshop as I didn’t know what O.R. was, I can say it’s the best workshop I’ve been to in a long time and I really bought into it’

‘We didn't know O.R. could help until we spoke to you’

‘What you said made a huge impression’

To find out more about Pro Bono O.R. visit http://www.theorsociety.com/Pages/Probono/Probono.aspx or email felicity.mcleister@theorsociety.com

Our latest success story with Harrogate and Ripon CVS (Quotes, photo's and case study slide)

Here are a few photo's of our volunteer analyst, Sarah Culkin, in action at Harrogate and Ripon CVS.  The project has just finished and has been a resounding success on both sides.

Karen Weaver (CEO): 'The findings will help inform forward planning for this service and also help to support funding bids.  The project has also played a part in assisting with the integration of this service into the wider organisation.'

Sarah Culkin: 'This project really opened my eyes to the challenges of the third sector, which I will bear in mind in my day job.  I also appreciated seeing the direct impact of my work and using OR skills in a new environment.'

Please click on the following link to see the case study slide: HARCVS case study slide

Pro Bono O.R. May Update #ProBonoOR

Pro Bono O.R. Update- May 2014

Another busy month for Pro Bono O.R.  Since starting in September 2013 we have had over 40 third sector organisations get in touch, we have completed 5 projects, are currently working with a further 10 and have another 4 about to commence.  Both the volunteers and the organisations have been really positive about the Pro Bono O.R. project.  The organisations have really benefitted from the volunteers expertise and time and the volunteers can practice their skills and gain wider experience amongst other things.

We now have almost 200 registered volunteers, 40 of whom have already worked or are working on projects.

On June 13^th Pro Bono O.R. will be running a workshop at #EvolveGtrMcr hosted by GMCVO and in partnership with NCVO.  The workshop will explain how Operational Research can make third sector organisations more effective.

We are really pleased with how the project is going so far.  If you are interested in receiving Pro Bono O.R. support, becoming a volunteer or just want to find out more information, please email felicity.mcleister@theorsociety.com or visit the Pro bono webpage: http://www.theorsociety.com/Pages/Probono/Probono.aspx

If you are not already a member of The OR Society and are interested in joining please visit https://www.theorsociety.com or send an email to carol.smith@theorsociety.com

Additionally you may be interested in becoming a member of our Third Sector Special Interest Group (ORiTS). For more details visit:  https://www.theorsociety.com/Pages/SpecialInterest/ORThirdSector.aspx