For over 10 years, Citizens Advice Sheffield had been providing advocacy services in Sheffield, as part of the Sheffield Advocacy Hub partnership. This hub offered various forms of advocacy support, where trained advocates help vulnerable individuals have their voices heard, access services, and exercise their rights. Before 2024, the Hub’s future was uncertain – the existing contract had been extended a few times already and was now due to end. Then they bid for – and won – a seven-year advocacy contract. This has allowed – and required – them to implement significant digital and organisational changes.
We’ve been working with Citizens Advice Sheffield for many years and when they contacted us a year ago about this project, we thought it could make a great action learning project for all sorts of charities. We suggested it, they agreed.
Fast forward to spring 2025. We commissioned Nick Scott to review what’s happened over the last year, interview key staff at Citizens Advice Sheffield and Lamplight, and distil whatever learning he could from it.
The result is a really compelling story. It’s not a prescriptive Project Management Handbook or dry set of flow charts and Gantt diagrams. It’s a valuable set of pointers, principles, ideas. The context is systems change and digital change, but the lessons are much broader. This isn’t a book to use; it’s a book to reflect on.
Project Management for Charities
Perhaps most the important context is that it’s change within a small charity. The language and assumptions of business school so often shape the tools and approaches that the non-profit world end up trying to adopt – but they don’t always fit.
To quote from the conclusion:
“By keeping their mission at the centre, they made difficult decisions, maintained staff engagement, and navigated the uncomfortable aspects of change. They balanced business as usual with transformation, monitored progress, learned from setbacks, and celebrated wins.
This isn’t just a pragmatic and effective approach to change – it is a statement of values. People over perfection. Service over systems. It typifies the flexible and human-centred approach Citizens Advice Sheffield have taken throughout the change programme”
Get It Now
Download the ebook for free here. Or if you’d like a hard copy give us a shout and we’ll pop one in the post.
