The Trinidad & To­ba­go Crick­et Board (TTCB) re­cent­ly con­tract­ed the firm of Lennox Sealy and As­so­ciates to con­duct a 'Man­age­ment Build­ing Ca­pac­i­ty' work­shop with mem­bers of the board's dif­fer­ent work­ing com­mit­tees. Spear­head­ing the ef­fort from the TTCB's cor­ner was ex­ec­u­tive mem­ber Dr Allen Sam­my. The TTCB has al­ready made sig­nif­i­cant strides by im­ple­ment­ing the Na­tion­al Crick­et Cen­ter and in the pur­suit of its mis­sion the twen­ty-three (23) ap­point­ed com­mit­tees now have the re­spon­si­bil­i­ty for co­or­di­nat­ing their work in or­der to pro­duce and man­age pro­grammes that will make crick­et the most suc­cess­ful­ly or­ga­nized sport in the Coun­try.

The work­shop, con­duct­ed by Lennox H Sealy & As­so­ciates (LSA) rep­re­sents the start of an ag­gres­sive jour­ney in this di­rec­tion. An ex­am­i­na­tion of the suc­cess­ful crick­et­ing coun­tries has shown that the achieve­ment of this ob­jec­tive re­quires best prac­tice in man­age­ment and strate­gic plan­ning. An ex­am­ple is Crick­et Aus­tralia's en­gage­ment of the in­ter­na­tion­al­ly-renowned con­sult­ing firm of McK­in­sey & Co. to help it an­a­lyze the busi­ness en­vi­ron­ment and repo­si­tion crick­et in Aus­tralia. Sealy in his re­port rea­soned that the TTCB in its ef­fort to be­come a World Class Crick­et Board must there­fore "bench­mark" best- prac­tice or­ga­ni­za­tions and al­ter its strate­gies by in­tro­duc­ing new tech­nolo­gies and tak­ing ac­tion so as to counter com­pe­ti­tion from oth­er sports.

He con­tin­ued : "It is wide­ly known that the de­vel­op­ment of a world class crick­eter re­quires per­son­al skill and ded­i­ca­tion on the� part of the play­er. How­ev­er, what be­comes ap­par­ent in any analy­sis of all bench­mark crick­et­ing or­ga­ni­za­tions across the globe e.g. "The Aus­tralia and South Africa Acad­e­mies is the im­por­tance of a mod­ern man­age­ment ap­proach, in­no­va­tion in train­ing tech­niques and the ne­ces­si­ty for a mod­ern, tech­no­log­i­cal­ly-dri­ven sup­port in­fra­struc­ture. These re­quire­ments must be in place to at­tain and sus­tain any lev­el of suc­cess in the high­ly com­pet­i­tive world of crick­et to­day."

ob­jec­tives

The work­shop was held pri­mar­i­ly to:

�2 To raise the lev­el of con­scious­ness about the im­pact of glob­al de­vel­op­ments on crick­et as a sport;

�2 In­tro­duce a ca­pac­i­ty build­ing mod­el that all the com­mit­tees could adopt;

�2 Use the mod­el as a guide to as­sist each com­mit­tee in de­vel­op­ing its terms of ref­er­ence, bear­ing in mind that the over­lap­ping of terms of ref­er­ences with oth­er com­mit­tees should be min­i­mized;

�2 Pro­vide guid­ance to each Com­mit­tee in de­vel­op­ing its poli­cies and pro­grammes for the dis­charge of its re­spec­tive TORs; and

�2 Walk each com­mit­tee through the process re­quired for the prepa­ra­tion of ac­tion/ im­ple­men­ta­tion plan(s) with time­lines, re­spon­si­bil­i­ties, clear­ly de­fined de­liv­er­ables, mea­sur­able in­di­ca­tors, out­comes and a method for mon­i­tor­ing, eval­u­at­ing and re work­ing plans with­in the agreed time frames.