Jim Delaney Consulting
Strategy, program design, learning, and evaluation for organizations in international development, climate, and sustainability.
About
I am Jim Delaney — a strategist, facilitator, and program designer with more than twenty years of experience at the intersection of international development, climate, and organizational learning. Over that period I have led large programs valued at more than $100 million across fourteen countries, raised over $32 million in a single year, and built teams and partnerships connecting universities, governments, and civil society organizations across three continents. My consulting practice now focuses on supporting leaders and their teams as they design and run programs that are honest about complexity, evaluate their work in ways that actually inform decisions, and stay effective as their operating environments change.
I work bilingually in English and French, from Ottawa, with clients globally. My consulting practice sits alongside my role as Executive Director of the Global Development Policy and Practice Hub at the University of Ottawa, which means the work I bring to clients is informed by an active research and teaching practice and an ongoing network across the international development sector.
Practice
A single commitment runs through everything I do: helping leaders, teams, and organizations build the capacity to think, design, and learn under conditions that will not hold still.
A five-year strategy assumes the world will hold still. A logframe assumes the program will. A summative evaluation assumes the question will. In my experience, none of these assumptions hold reliably any more. My practice is organized around adaptation: helping organizations build the strategic, programmatic, and evaluative muscle to keep making good decisions as their context keeps changing. The most durable value I can leave behind is rarely a document. It is a stronger internal capacity to do this work, together, over time.
What I do
I am most often brought in at moments of strategic transition, programmatic redesign, or renewal of an organization's learning systems — situations that call for considered thinking rather than a template. Most engagements draw on two or more of the following.
I work with leadership and their teams to think strategically and to respond to opportunities and risks as the context shifts. The point isn't a five-year document; it's a group of people who can keep making good calls together after I've gone.
I facilitate internal and external evaluation with a focus on developmental evaluation and approaches suited to programs still learning their way — including utilization-focused evaluation, outcome harvesting, and contribution analysis, alongside the results-based frameworks used by bilateral and multilateral funders. All of it centres on utilization: how the information an evaluation generates is actually used to inform what teams do next.
This is the newest for me: I help organizations design the information, knowledge, and AI infrastructure that lets their learning be captured and put to use. That increasingly includes the responsible introduction of generative AI: grounding it in your own work, configuring it for the workflows that matter, and building the governance to use it with confidence.
I support the design of new programs in development, sustainability, and climate, with a focus on initiatives that embrace complexity and drive systemic change. That means carefully built theories of change, adaptive management from the outset, and the proposal and business-development work needed to land complex, multi-year funding.
I design and facilitate learning processes: team retreats, communities of practice, executive courses, and the supporting structures that let learning be sustained over time. My approach is grounded in adult-learning theory and two decades of designing experiential programs at WUSC, the Coady Institute, and the University of Ottawa.
How I work
Most of the value I offer comes from thinking through problems in real conditions with the people responsible for them — not commenting on drafts from outside.
Every engagement should make the next one less necessary. I am explicit about the frameworks, skills, and habits I am using, and design the work so ownership rests with you once it ends. I believe that all leaders know their own fields better than anyone else, and I build upon that.
Complexity is real; it is also not a reason to defer decisions. My role is to help leaders identify the load-bearing decisions, name them clearly, and act with the best information available.
Clear day-rate engagements, fixed-scope project work, or longer-term advisory. I am open about what I think the work is worth — and what I would do differently with a smaller budget.
I run my practice alongside my part-time role at the University of Ottawa, take on a limited number of engagements each year, and am explicit at the outset about a realistic rhythm for the work at hand.
Contact
If you are navigating a strategy refresh, designing a new initiative, building a stronger learning culture, or working to make your evaluation practice more useful to your team, I would welcome a conversation.