How to Evaluate - York Consulting

Oldham and Rochdale HMREvaluation Techniques “How to Evaluate”4 CONCLUSION4.1 Evaluation can be a positive learning experience. It provides a way todemonstrate performance and achievement of projects and activities; and itcan also be a way of indentifying opportunities and demonstrating effectivesolutions to problems. Effective evaluation is key to the continualdevelopment of project and programme activity. It is an integral part of thelearning and improvement cycle which helps organisations to become moreefficient and have greater impact on their target participants. Considerationof evaluation at an early stage can give your project an edge. It provides aframework to analyse your projects performance in an objective andanalytical way and can give useful data to evidence the impact your workhas, which can be used in future funding applications.4.2 There are a number of key elements which if thoughtfully taken into accountcan provide a quality framework and approach from which to develop anevaluation:Table 4.1: Evaluation StepsProject Development Stage effective evaluation takes place at an Step 1: Understand and Developearly stage in project development Overarching and Project Objectives by setting good solid foundations whichclearly establish how the evaluation willrun, it can help the entire process torun more smoothly throughoutEvaluation Planning Stage there are many different types ofevaluation – you need to be clear aboutwhat you want to achieve decide on how to undertake theevaluation – internally or externallyManagement of the Evaluation Process the quality of the evaluation can beinfluenced at many levelsStep 2: Developing and UnderstandingEvaluation MethodologyStep 3: Managing the ProcessStep 4: Collecting Evidence49