Good things happen in the short term and bad things happen in the long term

This is a long title but I love that sentence, culled from Elliot Stern’s intervention on the Benefits and Barriers to Evaluation Use at the recent evaluation conference in Paris. The one-day conference, convened jointly by the European Evaluation Society, France’s evaluation society, the United Nations Organisation for Education, Science and Culture (UNESCO) and the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), took place at the quite extraordinary UNESCO headquarters in Paris.

A rough guide to building monitoring systems

Today, I wrote up a few lines for a colleague to summarise the key steps of building monitoring systems. For the case the same question pops up again, I have saved my response here:

Indicators and data collection instruments are just one aspect of a good monitoring system. Most importantly, early in (or ideally before) the actual project, people should sit down and think: 

Monitoring - It's the process that matters

Monitoring is about gathering information that helps us to function effectively, and about verifying whether we do the right things in the right ways. It is a natural part of human life - for example, every morning, I monitor the weather to determine what to wear so as to stay fresh and dry throughout the day. Monitoring makes me more effective in my life.