About the CRS Project Management Standards

Every day, CRS and our partners engage with millions of people around the world through hundreds of projects.

Effective project management is essential to fulfilling our mission to support vulnerable individuals and communities to meet their basic needs and positively transform their lives.

CRS developed project management standards to promote effective project management practice across the agency. The project management standards help to ensure that staff managing any CRS project, irrespective of size, context, focus, or funding, know what to do, and when. The standards promote high-quality CRS project management by:

• Defining the “what” of project management in CRS—the level that all CRS projects should meet and, whenever possible, exceed.
• Identifying a clear set of key actions that staff must perform repeatedly in a common, consistent way across all CRS projects.
• Providing an objective perspective from which to assess project management performance and promote shared accountability for success.

The project management standards reinforce CRS’ commitment to good stewardship of the resources entrusted to us, and accountability to the people we serve.

ORGANIZATION OF THE CRS PROJECT MANAGEMENT STANDARDS

The CRS project management standards focus on project management issues within four phases in CRS’ project management cycle:

• Design
• Start-up
• Implementation
• Close-out

Within these phases, CRS has defined 18 project management standards, with associated key actions, under four categories of project management:

• Operations and Program Planning and Management
• Financial Management
• Human Resource Management
• Donor Engagement and Accountability

Partnership; monitoring, evaluation, accountability and learning (MEAL); and other crosscutting considerations in CRS project management are addressed across the 18 standards

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