4. Evaluate

Play 04. Evaluate: outcomes & impacts

This is an important play as it will help us validate outcomes and determine successes. It also will help identify lessons learned, which will grow our toolbox and provide us with better intelligence. This ultimately will allow us to generate new content and additional best practices to help other Departments across the Agency.

“Driving towards continuous process improvement.”

Process Evaluations – assess the processes involved in organizing and/or implementing the project. The focus here is on evaluating organizational and project capabilities rather than results.

Impact Evaluations – assess short term objectives, which suggest that your larger goals are being achieved. Impact evaluations are much easier to measure because they consider benefits in terms of changes in beliefs and attitudes, skills, behavior and/or policies, structures and systems.

Outcome Evaluations – assess how effective you have been in meeting big picture goals. The difficulties associated with outcome evaluations include: attributing change to any one particular project; long periods between the project and being able to see change; and finding reliable and valid ways of gathering this type of information.

Establishing an evaluation process will ensure that the benefits anticipated by the implementation of any particular program or policy change are realized and an assessment can be made of the project’s overall success.

What are the lessons learned? How will you iterate on the current solution? What are the next steps?