Potential challenges to Systematic Outcomes Analysis July 23, 2007
Posted by Paul Duignan in : Systematic Outcomes Analysis, Evaluation planning , 1 comment so farSystematic Outcomes Analysis claims to provide a standardized approach to outcomes, monitoring and evaluation planning [see my previous post Can outcomes, monitoring and evaluation planning be standardized?]. What are the challenges people are likely to make to this claim and can they be answered? I’ve set out some of the major potential challenges below and provided some thoughts on each of them:
1. It is not possible to have a standardized approach to outcomes, monitoring and evaluation planning, every situation is unique.
This is the argument that evaluation is a ‘craft’ needing a skilled evaluation planner to tailor an evaluation to fit the unique situation. How can a ‘cook-book’ standardized approach do justice to the complexity of real world programs. This challenge should not be accepted until it’s been proved to be true. The best way to try to prove it is to try out a system like Systematic Outcomes Analysis to see if it does, in fact, fail when being used to plan particular types of evaluations. (more…)
Can outcomes, monitoring and evaluation planning be standardized? July 22, 2007
Posted by Paul Duignan in : Systematic Outcomes Analysis, Standards, Evaluation planning , 1 comment so farI was involved in an interesting discussion recently with a group of evalutors about whether outcomes, monitoring and evaluation planning can be standardized. In my experience, much evaluation planning starts from a blank slate with evaluators and project staff sitting around wondering about how they’re going to evaluate a specific program. Or, in other cases, for budgetary or other reasons, people who are not trained in evaluation have to work their way through basic texts about evaluation trying to work out how to do an evaluation. This all takes a great deal of time. Does it have to be like this? I’m not sure that it does.
Every time an organization sets up an accounting system, you don’t get the feeling that accountants have to build the entire accounting system from scratch. They simply put in place a number of basic building blocks of such systems and tailor them to the requirements of the particular organization. Why should monitoring and evaluation be any different? What I’ve been trying to do over a number of years in developing Systematic Outcomes Analysis is to develop such a standardized approach. (more…)
DoView - outcomes visualization software released July 19, 2007
Posted by Paul Duignan in : Systematic Outcomes Analysis, DoView , add a commentWe’ve just released our outcomes visualization software - DoView. We’ve been working on this for two years out of frustration at the difficulty of finding software which is just right for building outcomes models. We have designed it to be an affordable simple tool for those who want to build outcomes models (program logics, program theories, results chains, simple cause-effect models, strategy maps) for all sorts of purposes (strategic planning, monitoring, evaluation, evidence-based practice etc.)
The most exciting part of this for me is to finally have a tool with which I can use in real time during meetings when building outcomes models with stakeholders. We’ve designed it so that you can’t produce any model which can’t be clearly viewed when used with a data projector in a medium sized room. Far too often I’ve tried to work out what was happening in an outcomes model being presented on a data projector where you couldn’t read what was in the model because the font size was too small or there were causal link lines all over the place. (more…)