Chapter 3: Coordinating Administrative Practices
For inter-agency coordination to occur, agencies must navigate and comply with each agency’s own sets of administrative practices for planning and implementation of projects. These practices reflect regulations and norms regarding actions such as deliberation and decision-making, record-keeping, information tracking, budgeting, accounting, and purchasing. For some coordinating agencies, these administrative processes may complement each other, while for others the systems may diverge or even conflict. Coordinating agencies may also be subject to different laws, regulations, or other external constrains. When coordinating agencies face different internal or external constraints, careful planning and communication is necessary to ensure that each agency can find ways to work across their systems and complete projects in a manner satisfactory to all parties involved. In the following sections, we detail some of ways in which varying administrative processes can present challenges to coordinating agencies, as well as provide some recommendations for overcoming those challenges.