ZOPP, from the German term "Zielorientierte Projektplanung," translates in English to "Objectives-Oriented Project Planning." ZOPP is a project planning and management method that encourages participatory planning and analysis throughout the project cycle with a series of stakeholder workshops. The technique requires stakeholders to come together in a series of workshops to set priorities and plan for implementation and monitoring. The main output of a ZOPP session is a project planning matrix, which stakeholders build together. The purpose of ZOPP is to undertake participatory, objectives-oriented planning that spans the life of project or policy work to build stakeholder team commitment and capacity with a series of workshops.
ZOPP is a process that relies heavily on two particular techniques-matrix building and stakeholder workshops-to encourage participatory planning and management of development work. ZOPP helps a project team create a project planning matrix (PPM), similar to a Logical Framework or LogFRAME, to provide indepth analysis of project objectives, outputs, and activities. The PPM results from stakeholder workshops that are scheduled through the life of a project to encourage brainstorming, strategizing, information gathering, and consensus building among stakeholders.
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The PPM is central to ZOPPbased project work because the process of building it relies on repeated, collaborative stakeholder input. In the stakeholder workshops in which the matrix is developed systematic attention is paid to five important issues:
Participants first review the variety of means available to achieve the project objective. The project planning matrix shows activities and results as well as the conditions necessary for achieving both. These conditions are important assumptions on which rest decisions about activities, location, timing, procurement, and so on. The information is organized along two axes that show (a) why the project is being undertaken and (b) what the project outputs are that signal success. The PPM thus systematically answers the following questions:
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ZOPP is not a oneshot exercise; the designers of the planning method envisioned strategic planning "phases," each of which requires a workshop that focuses on a fixed goal. In the workshops, participants analyze key issues throughout the project cycle. No set formula exists for a successful stakeholder workshop. In fact, each one is truly unique because it brings together a blend of people who have never before worked as a group and who need to create a common language to understand one another's widely divergent concerns. As described by its creators at GTZ, five distinct ZOPP phases, which run alongside the project cycle, can lead to a sound strategic project plan.
In the traditional conception of ZOPP, the first three of the five phases take place during project planning. The theory here is that extensive, earnest efforts to plan collaboratively prior to implementation increase the likelihood of smooth implementation and the degree of stakeholder ownership and readiness to work toward sustainability.
Collaboration is not "automatically" part of the ZOPP process. The project team, borrower, and stakeholders must commit to adopting a participatory stance for the overall project; otherwise, the ZOPP process is merely an organizing tool. During each planning phase of the ZOPP process, participants reinforce their commitment to include the diverse expertise and concerns of a variety of stakeholders.
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Objectives-oriented planning assumes that joint analysis and planning is necessary throughout the project cycle. If instituted early in the life of a project, ZOPP can provide a ready forum for extensive participation of diverse stakeholders. ZOPP is also a helpful approach to jump starting stalled project initiatives.
For a variety of reasons, promising projects have been known to falter unexpectedly in midstream. In these cases, ZOPP can be a powerful tool for reorganizing if stakeholders' resolve to "save" the project is grounded in a broader commitment to collaboration.
In its initial form, ZOPP was created to be closely tied to the project cycle; hence, it has mostly been used in a variety of sector and country settings for project work. The two main component tools of ZOPP-the stakeholder workshop and the PPM-can also be used for the participatory planning of policy and economic sector work.
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Gesellschaft für Technische Zusammenarbeit (GTZ). 1991. Methods and Instruments for Project Planning and Implementation. Eschborn: Germany.
GTZ. 1988. ZOPP (An Introduction to the Method). Eschborn, Germany.
GTZ. 1988. ZOPP in Brief. Eschborn, Germany.
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The Task Manager for an Industrial Efficiency and Pollution Control project for the Philippines took the initiative to create communication linkages among government, the Bank, sector of activity, and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) to establish a common Bank-borrower team approach to the project preparation process.
Through the local counterpart agency, the Task Manager organized a series of stakeholder meetings to further refine problem formulations and define the objectives for a project that had yet to be identified.
A ZOPP-based approach was used to bring together stakeholders who initially felt that their conflicting priorities would prevent them from reaching consensus on project objectives.
Not only did stakeholders achieve consensus on objectives and prioritization, but the communication linkages begun in the two-day workshop began a dialogue on systematically focusing on community-level demands to encourage participation and ownership at the local level.