Can outcomes, monitoring and evaluation planning be standardized? July 22, 2007
Posted by Paul Duignan in : Systematic Outcomes Analysis, Standards, Evaluation planning , trackbackI 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.
What Systematic Outcomes Analysis tries to do is to provide a generic framework which:
- Lets anyone coming from any outcomes, monitoring or evaluation philosophy set out exactly what they’re planning to do in a particular instance.
- Ensures that planners can quickly identify and decide on which of the basic building blocks they need to put in place in a particular case.
- Ensures that the basic decisions about measurement, attribution (proving a particular player caused an outcome to change) and accountability are dealth with in a robust and standardized way, without readers having to wade through the long discussions of these issues which fill up the introductory sections of the many evaluation reports I read.
- Allows the specific design of a particular outcomes, monitoring and evaluation system to be quickly communicated to an interested reader.
Whether or not Systematic Outcomes Analysis will prove to be a useful way for standardizing evaluation planning will be determined by whether or not people use it in this way. However, separate from whether this one particular system turns out to be useful, I think that we should strive towards increasing the standardization of the way in which we set out outcomes, monitoring and evaluation plans. [See my next post Potential challenges to Systematic Outcomes Analysis for a discussion of the potential challenges Systematic Outcomes Analysis needs to be able to answer].
Paul Duignan (outcomesblog.org)
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