Situation
A national trade regulatory body responsible for customs processing at two major land border crossings was averaging 14-day commercial clearance times against a 3.5-day regional benchmark. Import tax recovery was 23% below theoretical yield. GIZ had commissioned an institutional readiness assessment before deploying an automated risk-profiling system — recognizing that the technology would fail without institutional foundations the authority did not have.
Complication
The authority's structure had not been revised since 2004. Inspectors operated without standardized procedures. A previous IT implementation had been abandoned after 18 months due to user rejection. When I arrived at the first border crossing, I found that three of the most experienced senior inspectors were informally operating their own clearance queue outside the official process. That informal system was faster and more accurate than the official one — which meant any reform had to learn from it rather than simply eliminate it.
The Critical Decision — What Almontather Rassoul Saw and Did Differently
I made the decision to engage those three senior inspectors as technical advisors to the procedure revision process rather than as subjects of reform. That was not the approach GIZ had specified in the scope. I presented my reasoning to the program director: the informal system they had built contained accumulated operational intelligence that would take years to reconstruct if we destroyed it. Incorporating them as co-designers produced better SOPs and removed the primary source of change resistance at both crossings. Two of the three became internal champions of the reform program.
Methodology — Why This Approach and Not Another
I chose to run three tracks concurrently — policy revision, training delivery, and change management — rather than sequentially, because the previous IT project had failed by attempting implementation before staff were ready. Running tracks in parallel meant that by the time policy documents were finalized, training was already underway and the change management groundwork had already shifted the culture at supervisor level.
Resolution — Delivered by Almontather Rassoul / MRC Firm Ltd.
Track one: 22 updated SOPs aligned to WTO valuation frameworks and the Revised Kyoto Convention, co-developed with the authority's senior inspectors. Track two: an 80-hour training curriculum delivered to 140 customs officials across both crossings, achieving a 41% average knowledge gain. Track three: a reform steering committee, an internal champion network anchored by the three senior inspectors, and a phased communication strategy framing reform as a protection of inspector professional status.
What Was Not Fully Resolved — and Why
The automated risk-profiling system deployment was scheduled to begin six months after the engagement concluded and falls outside this engagement's scope. The institutional foundations established were assessed by GIZ as sufficient for technology deployment to proceed.
“Rassoul's decision to involve our senior inspectors as co-designers was not what we expected and not what we had specified. It was demonstrably correct. Those individuals became the program's strongest internal advocates — a shift that would not have happened with any other approach we have seen applied in this context.”
— Program Director, GIZ FFM II
Consultant: Almontather Rassoul, PhD · MRC Firm Ltd. · montather-rassoul.com · linkedin.com/in/montatherrassoul