Does Monitoring and Evaluation M&E Planning have to be so cumbersome and painful? Just finished Bangkok Conference Presentation

I was invited to give a presentation to the 1st Pan Asia-Africa Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) Forum: Results-Based Management & Evaluation (RBM&E) and Beyond: Increasing M&E Effectiveness held in Bangkok. I’ve just finished my presentation which was called: ‘Anyone Else Think the Way We Do Our M&E Work is Too Cumbersome and Painful?’

I’ve had to review many Monitoring and Evaluation Plans in the past and I’ve generally found them long and tedious documents. I’ve also had to write them myself and realize that the tedium is not only on the part of the reader! It’s usually really hard to quickly overview what the M&E Plan is going to measure and the evaluation questions that are going to be asked.

Normally once the plan has been used to get funding for the M&E work, it’s just put in a desk drawer and other documentation is used to control the implementation of the M&E Plan and make presentations on it.

In the presentation, I outlined the new DoView Visual M&E Planning. This approach takes the pain out of writing (and reading) M&E plans and creates major efficiencies.

It takes 1/2 the time to create an M&E plan; it’s entirely visually based, which makes it easy to see what is, and (just as important) what’s not, being measured; the same DoView file can be used to control the implementation of the M&E work; all presentations can be made just using the DoView M&E Plan (you don’t need to create additional Powerpoints); and you can, if you wish fully integrate project strategic planning into M&E planning (the Holy Grail of putting the ‘P” – ‘Planning’ – back into ‘M&E’).

The virtual presentation was in the form of a three short videos (about 6-7 minutes each) and a Skype question and answer session afterwards.

Check out the three short videos of the presentation here. The first video describes the reason we should move from the traditional approach and the second and third video show you how to do use the new DoView paradigm. If you want the resource page on the DoView website which shows you how to build a DoView Visual M&E Plan and gives an example you can download, it’s here.

Paul Duignan PhD. Blogs at OutcomesBlog.org, is at Twitter.com/PaulDuignan, You are welcome to participate in the DoView Community of Practice on Linkedin. Download a DoView trial at DoView.com.