You may be feeling defensive and uncomfortable at the prospect of your project being evaluated.

It feels as if you’re heading to court where you’ll be cross-examined, criticised and then judged. Perhaps you, or your project, will be found wanting with uncomfortable consequences for everyone.

Perhaps you’ve tried to push this spectre out of the way, meanwhile your doubts grow larger each time you consider it. Now you can’t put it off any longer.

The good news is there’s no to need to fear an evaluation. This is because a professional evaluation involves a series of steps before coming to any element of judgement. These steps are:

• understanding the context of your project – why it was set up and how it operates
• agreeing with you a shortlist of important project objectives to review
• reviewing existing information on your project, from your project records
• identifying what extra information is needed and how it will be obtained, usually information and opinions of: clients, project staff and stakeholders
• discussing and agreeing survey plans with you
• impartial analysis of all the information that’s collected
• drawing conclusions and making recommendations based on all the preceding steps.

Professional evaluations also follow good practice guidelines, like those of the UK Evaluation Society, which protect the interests of all parties.

So, while evaluation does eventually involve an element of judgement, like a good court case it is based on first collecting sound evidence. Unlike a court case, there is no fierce cross-examination, and no desire to reach the black and white extremes of a ‘Guilty’ or ‘Not guilty’ verdict.

The bottom line: Please be assured that evaluation is a fair process, involving full discussion with a range of parties, with conclusions emerging logically from the information and opinions collected.

© May Johnstone, 2008, mayjohnstone.co.uk. Please feel free to circulate this article provided it is used in its entirety, including this acknowledgement.

Chances are the upcoming evaluation of your project is going to put a strain on your time and resources.

You want it to go smoothly, so you can keep your other work moving. Here are five steps which will help you keep your evaluation hassle-free. 

1. Get people on board

Getting people on board at the outset saves hassles later on. You don’t want to work all the way through the evaluation, come up with a good set of recommendations and then find senior management have other priorities, or project staff are resistant to the proposed changes.

Keys

• Prepare your reasons why the evaluation will benefit: your organisation / the project / partners / stakeholders / other parties, taking into account the wider picture of these parties, and how your project fits in.
• Be prepared to genuinely listen to difficulties the various parties may raise, and then seek ‘win-win’ solutions to these difficulties. This may involve modifying your plans.
• Get people on board at the outset, that way you can create a positive environment from the start.

2. Foster a positive environment

A positive environment around the evaluation will help diminish the threat that some people feel when they hear the ‘evaluation’ word. Those closely involved with the inception of the project, and those running it on a day to day basis may think of it as ‘their baby’, and feel defensive at the thought of it being ‘assessed’, particularly if an outsider is involved. This might discourage them from engaging fully in the evaluation.

Keys:

• Tell people about the evaluation as early as possible, and take every opportunity to remind them about it.
• Keep them fully informed as the evaluation progresses, particularly of changes.
• Show your own positive attitude in practical ways, and make it clear you’re personally learning from the evaluation.

3. Treat the evaluation as a learning opportunity

A good way to take the threat out of the evaluation is to treat it as a learning opportunity. In this way ‘criticisms’ can be turned into ‘suggestions’, and ‘mistakes’ into ‘lessons for the future’.

Keys:

• Proactively adopt a no-blame culture yourself; where mistakes are OK so long as lessons are learned.
• Encourage this learning culture within your team and wider sphere of influence.
• Include an aim ‘to learn from the evaluation process’ in the evaluation specification.

4. Allocate time to the evaluation

If you’re short of time you may plan to contract some or most of the evaluation out to a consultant. If this is the case, you’ll still need to spend time helping the consultant understand what your project aims to achieve, what your stakeholders are looking for etc. Otherwise you may end up with an evaluation report which isn’t particularly helpful to you.

Keys:

• Schedule enough time to ensure any consultant involved really understands your project – how it originated, its aspirations, and how it works on a day to day basis, They will also need to know how your organisations works.
• Schedule admin time to collate lists of clients, stakeholders, project achievements, and any monitoring data. It’s very unlikely an outsider can do this for you.
• Schedule regular times into your diary to be in touch with the consultant. If everything runs smoothly this time may not all be needed; if there are hitches you’ll have the time to deal with them.

5. Develop a specification for your evaluation

Without a spec, like a meeting without an agenda, evaluation feedback will drift off in all directions, and you’ll have a hard job drawing any conclusions.Even if you plan to carry out the evaluation yourselves, you’ll need a specification of what it aims to achieve, as well as any constraints such as timescale and budget.

You can use the evaluation specification as the basis of a contract with any consultant you decide to appoint to help with the evaluation.

Keys:

• Prepare the evaluation aims and objectives in consultation with colleagues, project staff, funders and any partners. This will help get them on board, and the whole process will focus attention on your project.
• Focus the evaluation on key project objectives; usually it’s impractical to check out achievement of all of a project’s aims and objectives.
• Include timescale and budget, and any suggestions you have for the evaluation methods. Be open to revising the specification if needed as the project progresses.

You’ve probably noticed that three of the five steps to a hassle-free evaluation are ‘people’ factors: getting them on board, fostering a positive environment and treating the process as a learning opportunity.

Taking steps to address these ‘people’ aspects greatly increases your chances of setting up the evaluation, running it and achieving positive follow-up. Someone inside the organisation needs to be involved in addressing these steps; they can’t readily be achieved by an outsider, though an outside perspective can certainly help.

Of course there can be all sorts of technical hitches too, and an experienced evaluator will help you take care of these. Allocating time to the evaluation and having a clear evaluation specification will minimise these hitches.

The bottom line: Address these five steps and you’ll be well on the way to a hassle-free evaluation!

It’s pretty much the same with research, you need to know where you are now, what you want to know, and what you’ll do with the information you get.

1.    How does your project fit into the big picture?

If you’re a hands-on project manager, it’s easy to get so engrossed in the detail that you forget to stand back from time to time and check how it fits into the bigger picture.

Whether you want to research the feasibility of a new project, evaluate the achievements of a two year project, or something in between, it’s essential to step back and check how your project fits into the bigger picture of your organisation, and any project partners, and any other key stakeholders.

Funding and co-operation from within your organisation, and perhaps from partners, depend on your project contributing to their aims or policies. It’s a good idea to update yourself on their current policies/aims so you keep your project research aligned with this bigger picture.

Knowing where your stakeholders are heading, will influence the questions you want the research to tackle.

2.    What questions do you want answered?

Next you need to get a clear picture of the questions you want the research to answer. Broad questions like: ‘Would it be feasible for us to move into our own premises?’, or ‘Has the training pilot been a success?’ are often the start point that initiates the research.

However, they need to be broken down into a series of more specific questions. For the premises idea, these might be:

• What are the advantages and disadvantages of buying, renting and leasing premises?
• What are the capital and running costs of each option?
• Would there be scope to earn revenue?
• Overall, would it be feasible for us to have our own premises?

For the training pilot:

• To what extent did the training pilot meet its original objectives?
• What improvements were made to the programme during its two years of operation?
• How could it be developed for the future?

3.    What will you do with the answers?

When you initiate research it’s easy to get waylaid by the statement ‘Wouldn’t it be nice to know…’ Committee members, who will probably comment on your research proposal, often come in with suggestions from their varied agendas.

If you want to avoid your research growing from a molehill into a mountain, you need to be very clear how the information will be used. That clarity will help keep the research focused.

Broad uses of project research include:

• justifying stakeholder funding and support (feasibility studies)
• getting a profile of project clients (baseline studies)
• learning from the project so it can be improved in future (evaluations)
• learning from a pilot project, to develop future policy
• reporting back to funders (evaluations)

The bottom line: Getting clear on the big picture, the questions you want answered and how your research will be used provides a firm foundation for moving forward  to commission research, or develop your own research plan, or obtain funding for your research.