Along with self-sufficiency in business strategy planning, marketing, manufacturing processes, and retail production and distribution should bring the evaluation of these aforementioned tasks. The development of an organization's capacity to plan, conduct, and use evaluation is crucial to not only the success of individual programs, processes, and tasks, but also the overall success of the organization as a whole. This applies to all disciplines (e.g., non-profits, NGOs, for-profits, education, government, military).
Although many definitions of evaluation capacity building (ECB) now circulate the globe, I believe the simplest working definition can be found in the writing of Stockdill, Baizerman, and Compton (2002), where they define ECB as, "the intentional work to continuously create and sustain overall organizational processes that make quality evaluation and its uses routine" (p. 14). Here evaluation becomes the norm rather than the exception. Evaluations themselves and the corresponding structure become transparent within the organization. All hierarchical levels in the organization - from the clerical staff to the team leaders to the CEO - understand and capitalize on the importance of evaluation and how it affects business processes and the accompanying bottom line. Creating evaluation capacity with any type of organization involves not only evaluators, but also the organization itself. Both parties need to take a proactive mindset to create the organizational structure needed to support evaluation capacity.
As an organizational leader, think of evaluation capacity building as creating evaluation self-sufficiency within your organization. You not only need to see the importance of
evaluation in the short and long term, but also develop the skills to conduct evaluations and use the results of such to further your business vision.
A good place to start is to think about the topics listed in A Checklist for Building Organizational Capacity (Volkov and King, 2007) made available through The Evaluation Center at Western Michigan University. Discuss these principles with your colleagues and how you can implement them in your daily practice. There are many resources available to assist you, such as evaluation consultants, professional development opportunities, etc.
The first step is to understand how becoming self-sufficient in evaluation can improve your organizational mission, vision statements, goals, and ultimately the bottom line. Then take additional steps to see that goal become a reality.
The answer to all three of these scenarios is that you don't know unless you evaluate the progress or impact of those programs.
Evaluation judges the merit or worth of something, whether that something is a program, product, process, performance, or policy. Evaluation helps you determine its impact on your organization, the community, and the people involved. Evaluation can guide your strategic planning. Evaluation can save you time and money.
As an organizational leader, consider the following questions:
These questions are just the first step in helping your organization become more effective. To answer these questions, you can seek out information on how to plan, conduct, and analyze evaluations. You can work with an external evaluator, or learn how to develop your organization's capacity for conducting internal evaluations.
Evaluation equals understanding and decision-making power.
The team environment was exceptional. As an academic support unit, the CTL is the right arm of the university, and constantly strives to be in tune with the academic needs of the faculty. As a member of an evaluation team, we all worked together to not only resolve evaluation issues, but to enhance our own evaluation skills via professional development sessions and references. Evaluators stick together and help each other to continuously improve.
I would recommend to any evaluator to seize the opportunity to collaborate with other evaluators, whether in an academic or business setting. It's a win-win situation when you do.
]]>There are many opinions, and there probably is no right or wrong answer, but since this is my blog, I get to state my opinions and experiences to my heart's content. :)
As I understand it, both research and evaluation ask what is. Then research asks why, which indicates a theoretical basis, whereas evaluation asks what should be, which makes reference to the standards and criteria of evaluations.
]]> That is not to say that evaluation never asks why, or even that research never asks what should be. However, in the evaluation field, we are making a value judgment about the merit or worth of a program, product, or process. We find out what the situation is (i.e., the current state, if you will, of the evaluand), what the criteria (i.e., what should the evaluand be doing) and standards (i.e., what is our level of acceptability for the criteria) are for the evaluand, and then we judge the worth of the evaluand based on those criteria and standards.Research, on the other hand, seeks to understand what the situation is, but then probes into why the situation is that way and how we can better understand the situation with regard to developing, expanding, and testing various theories.
In the evaluation field, both evaluation and research are necessary to further the work and to train evaluators. The area of evaluation research in particular deals with conducting research about evaluation (as opposed to conducting evaluations). We seek to understand why evaluations happen (or do not happen) in particular ways. We develop evaluation theories (although some choose to refer to them as models) to try to explain these occurrences, and continuously test these theories in different environments.
Evaluation and research form a symbiotic relationship. Evaluators, in turn, seek to understand and learn from both.
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