There is a version of this story I have heard more times than I can count. A consultant delivers a thorough MEL framework. The programme team nods. The document is saved to a shared drive. Six months later, nobody is sure whose job it is to update it.

This is not a story about a bad framework. It is a story about a bad handover.

Most frameworks fail for the same three reasons. They are designed around what the funder needs to see rather than what the team needs to know. They are built with leadership, not with the people who will actually use them. More often than not, they are delivered as finished products rather than grown as shared understanding. When the consultant leaves, the logic leaves with them.

A framework survives when two conditions are met: At least one person inside the organisation understands why it is built the way it is and not just what it contains. Second, it is designed around the team's actual capacity, not their theoretical capacity. A data collection method that requires a monthly focus group assumes someone has time to run it. When that assumption is wrong, the framework is not adapted. It is abandoned.

The test is not whether the framework is rigorous. The test is whether it is used.

At Nuvora, every engagement includes two working sessions with the programme team. Not leadership only, but the people running activities and talking to participants. The first maps the programme as it actually runs. The second stress-tests the draft before anything is finalised. The result is sometimes messier than what a consultant working alone would produce. But it sits on desks rather than in shared drives.