The good old ‘one pager’ contraint again July 9, 2009
Posted by Paul Duignan in : Communicating outcomes models, Doing evaluation more efficiently, DoView, Easy Outcomes, Outcomes models, Outcomes systems architecture, Using the approach , trackbackI’ve been up against the good old ‘one pager’ constraint again in a couple of contexts recently. This is where there is the demand that the outcomes for an organization or program be ‘put on one page’. It comes in various forms and is often a demand from senior management or a perceived demand from them to ‘keep things simple’. Now, there’s nothing wrong with the idea of summarizing things and paper overviews play a role in that. But such things should be seen as one of a range of different types of summaries and products which are produced by an underlying outcomes system, not the beginning and end of an outcomes effort.
It’s best to think of the analogy between outcomes systems and accounting systems. People may ask for all sorts of summaries of their accounts, but they all expect that beneath these summaries will be a comprehensive accounting system from which such reports are generated. We have not yet got to that stage with outcomes systems, but hopefully over time we can move in that direction.
It’s a real problem if you just see outcomes exercises as producing a particular communication product, whether it be a one page diagram or a written report of a particular length. What happens in such situations is that the whole focus is on what is going to go on the page or in the report. As always, various compromises are made and various draft versions of the finished product are produced. Often good analytical work is lost (e.g. the way that activities map onto outcomes) because it cannot be fitted onto a single page, or because it cannot be put into a short report. If the work has been done, but discarded as draft material, it then languishes and gets progressively out of date.
Another related angle on this issue is that you can find that the way you structure the elements within your system becomes dictated by the one pager you are producing. For instance you can find yourself combining activities so that there will not be ‘too many to fit on the page’. However in doing so you may, at the same time, be losing your analytical power to identify where your effort is going and how it maps onto individual outcomes.
The only systematic way to go about outcomes work is to see the end point of such work as being to produce a comprehensive well-constructed outcomes structure. Such structures can be built progressively over time so they don’t have to be overwhelming exercises. However the most important thing is that they be set up to include a place for the five building blocks of all outcomes systems. Progressively building them in this way means that they will be soundly based and each time one returns to the outcomes issue you can leverage off the work you have already done to incrementally improve the system.
Once you get your analytical work done you can then produce all sorts of communications products from your underlying system. These can be one page summaries, but they can also be things such as fully navigable web page models of your outcomes structure (if you are using outcomes software like DoView) which gives you much more room to communicate lots of information about your outcomes than you can get just from a single page diagram.
Paul Duignan, PhD
Outcomes and Evaluation Blog (OutcomesBlog.org)
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