Taking up the task of Monitoring and Evaluation in a Project

Monitoring and Evaluation as it comes to the mind by its meanings, is an important

aspect of the life of a person, project, business or an organization. These two words fit
everywhere in the day to day life. One has to monitor as well as evaluate everything
that comes across in the life like health, family, business and so on and so forth. So
M&E becomes an integral part of the whole life.

Any project, small or big, is also to be monitored and evaluated. Since M&E is a tool
for the management and the donors for project steering and course correction, it
carries much of weight in its importance. Generally speaking all the projects are
monitored and evaluated, but very few might be properly monitored. Due to improper
monitoring and evaluation the results that are desired by implementing the project, are
not achieved. There are certain things that need to be considered about the projects. In
the following lines I would throw some light on those aspects that in my opinion are
crucial for the success of a project.

In the lives of the projects there has been a cycle like the following.

I would like to give my opinion of how the M&E should look like in the projects.

M&E as integral part of the initial planning.

It has been observed generally that while doing planning for the projects, M&E is not
given its due attention. The people think that it is not the issue which needs to be
tackled right from the beginning and when the implementation of the project starts
then the question of monitoring will come, which is totally wrong and that is the
reason M&E becomes often a difficult thing to do. Another thing is that the planners
don’t want to invest on the M&E so it is not done at the right time, again resulting in
the unwanted problems.

As the project moves towards it completion the M&E becomes a hot topic for
discussion in the meetings and forums but since the system being not in place can not
bear the fruits as desired by the donors and the management teams. The pressure is
then posed on the M&E teams (though they are still generally speaking not having
sufficient man-power) and the negative effects are thrown over them for not doing
proper monitoring and sometimes even not achieving the desired results.

Here are some suggestions that need to be considered in the future, for the new
projects and also for the new phases of the projects that are ahead. One might think of
better ideas but I hope the basic theme remains the same as I am going to mention
here.

The M&E Plans must be the integral part of the initial planning and not the separate
entity that would be dealt with separately when the questions arise about what the
project had been doing. Once you consider M&E in the beginning and invest some
efforts into it, it might give you much of ease and much better and cost effective
results of the project as envisaged in the formulation of the project. The projects
would not have to invest in hiring expensive external expertise for evaluating the
projects except the Post Project Impact Evaluation. Even this PPIE would be possible
to carry out without involving big costly external consultants. This will also help to
keep the track even if there is high turn over of the M&E personnel because the
system would have been in place right from the beginning and so there will be no
difficulty at all in collating the past data with the present situations and also correlate
it with the future planning.

Timely and To the Pont Planning:

A good project would be that is planned in a way that every aspect is considered
realistically during the initial thinking process and planning. It depends on how
effective the people involved in the planning are. Proper time should be given to the
initial planning process. A week or so might be good to collect all the stake holders in
an isolated (away from daily routine businesses) comfortable place, involving project
management, implementers, target group(s) and donors so that all the aspects are
discussed right from the beginning. It must involve a good moderator preferably an
outsider (not necessarily an expatriate) having got the authority to stop anybody to
avoid unnecessary discussion that often results in delays and improper planning. It is
observed that some people (know-it-all kind of people) discuss the things
unnecessarily that wastes time and at the end of the session then the people tend to
wrap up the things and not giving proper time for consideration to sometimes very
crucial matters. This results in ineffective planning that leads to nothing that is desired
by the project. Lots of efforts and energies then go in vain. If the planning in the
beginning is done properly, it would prove very cost effective. It is like, suppose you
buy a car. You don’t inspect it and then once you have bought it, it gives you hard
time and you invest more money with its maintenance than what you bought it for. So
it is most important to discuss and decide on all the aspects relevant to that particular
project well on time during the primary planning process.

The moderator should normally prepare his or her basic plan as decided in the
planning exercise within a couple of weeks or so, as agreed upon in the TOR. It
should then be distributed among the stake holders including those who could not due
to any reason participate in the planning exercise. They should be given a deadline for
their inputs and then a final day should be set to approve the plan. Once it is approved
the changes then only should be made periodically like after review sessions of the
project. The main purpose is that it should not take more than the time set for
planning. It is possible to foresee how long it might take so the process must be
started well before the expected or planned date of implementation in order to
complete the planning process within the time frame set for it. If this is not followed it
will never give fruits rather will result in unforeseen problems creating tensions and
headaches for the staff as well as the management. (MACP example: Does it make
sense that an annual plan is not final and a full quarter has lapsed whereas it was
started in September 2004, and one does not know how long will it still take to
finalize it? {This sentence should be deleted after you read it please}). If it is expected
for example, that this planning process would take six months, it must be started eight
months before the date of implementation of the project or project phase whatsoever.

Realistic planning:

One aspect that should be taken into consideration during planning of a project is that
whatever is planned should be based on the real life situation. Generally the plans are
made very ambitiously and then their implementation becomes very difficult. The
main reason is that first of all there is no baseline data available and secondly the
planners are unaware of the real life situation of the project area. So sitting in the big
hotels only doesn’t serve the purpose. Somebody must be there in the planning
exercise who could lead towards the possibilities of the real life in the proposed
project area. He or she must be trustworthy and his/her say must be considered during
the discussion. Only making ambitious plans might serve some individual purposes
but wouldn’t give fruitful results.

Baseline Data:

During the planning of a project, it must be planned to collect baseline data about the
existing situation that could be used during the whole project life for reference to
measure change or project impact whatsoever. I believe that ideally it must be
collected before the start of the project implementation. For this purpose sufficient
funds should be allocated and resources used with crystal clear output about the data
types and that what should be measured and what need not to be measured before the
project. That will save the implementers from lots of headaches that are faced during
the project life without a baseline data. The data should be such that could be used to
refer to as to measure the change taking effect due to project intervention. This would
be easily possible by looking at the project purpose as to what the project is intended
to achieve during or after its life. A project without the baseline data might achieve a
lot but correlating this achievement with the existing situation would prove not that
reliable as it should be. It is observed that sometimes even very big and very effective
projects find it difficult to measure the change that has taken place due to the project
interventions. When the question arises the management of the project then goes for
surveys asking the community to let them know about the change that has taken place.
The people are asked “how was the situation before the project and what is the
situation now?” this generally is not that reliable and sometimes biased by both the
interviewer (that might be the project personnel) and the community member. Also
relying on the memories of the people will never give the real impact analysis.