Develop teams and individuals BSBLED401A

Develop teams and individuals BSBLED401A By Yuwaluck Pongkasemsombut ID: C62152

Individual learning plans Based on scenario of Sherman Pty Ltd is a multinational organization operating at the Information Technology market and its sales department has been recently experiencing some problems affecting its outcomes. It appears that the team members work as individualists, they are not cooperating with each other and they are not working effectively as a team. We should learn about how to develop a learning plan for individuals and team learning plan. We will start about how a learner will get from their starting point on a learning journey to the desired end point. They may be for one course and include the acquisition of qualifications and skills, or may link several courses that give progression to different levels (from level 1 to 3, or from level 2 to Higher Education). They should be individual for each learner to reflect aspirations, aptitude and needs. Although there may be common learning goals and methods of delivery for all learners on a particular course, it is unlikely that all learners have exactly the same learning styles, abilities, support needs, access to assessment in the workplace (if applicable), previous qualifications or experience. Too many vocationally-based courses have identical individual learning plans where only the names of learners are different. Some will struggle to achieve them while others will find them too easy and lose interest by not being sufficiently challenged.

Individual learning plans (cont.) Individual learning plans should start from a common format, listing general outcomes, and then develop as initial assessment and circumstances impact. They should be live documents that are useful to the learner, delivery staff and possibly employers . How does the way you use individual learning plans to support your learners compare with that of the most effective provision seen on inspection?The following strengths and areas for improvement have been taken from recent inspection reports. Common inspection strengths • Effective use of individual learning plans • Good individual learning plans • Good development of individual learning plans Common inspection areas for improvement • Poor development of individual learning plans • Inadequate use of individual learning plans • Poor planning of learning

Individual learning plans (cont.) Particularly effective practice identified in inspections includes: • Developing a proforma for an individual learning plan that does not just meet the needs of funding bodies but covers all the elements required for a programme of learning. The development of the best proformas has taken into account the need to provide sufficient space for updating them. • Not completing individual learning plans in a rush to meet funding body requirements (inspectors still see the individual learning plan being completed and signed off in induction before initial assessment is fully completed so that a copy can be sent to the funding body). • Examples of developing a second individual learning plan as a 'working document' used throughout the time a learner is with the provider, that is focused on delivery of learning, assessment, support and target setting. • Delivery staff receiving training in order to understand the results of initial assessment, such as literacy, numeracy or language requirements, and their impact on learning. This includes other learner support needs such as dyslexia, to ensure that the individual learning plan reflects support, assessment arrangements and possible need for extra time.

Individual learning plans (cont.) • Taking account of previous experience and learning, so that targets and times to gain assessments in an area in which learners have previous experience are realistic and do not hold the progress of learners up. Plans are individual in developing targets that stretch learners and keep them focused on achieving realistic milestones. • Ensuring that each learner has an individual learning plan, based on their initial assessment and mapping the route from that starting point to the achievement of individual goals, for example completing the full framework, or gaining sustainable employment. • Involving the learner in creating the first draft of their learning plan, understanding the reason for its contents and updating the plan with the learner (and employer if applicable) as training progresses and circumstances change. • Using the learning plan as a working document by checking progress against it during reviews or tutorial activities, amending target dates for milestones such as achievement of units, key skills or other qualifications as necessary. • Planning in more detail for the short term targets and in outline for the longer term targets.

Individual learning plans (cont.) • Using the individual learning plan to record how any additional support needs, identified by initial assessment, are to be provided for. This helps keep everyone involved in training in the 'loop' and helps eliminate support being given in isolation from the main training programme. • There are several examples of work-based providers having targets that reflect particular types of 'model learner', for example ones who have previous experience or qualifications, or those with additional support needs. These act as a preliminary guide in setting targets which can then be altered as the learner progresses. • Some providers have altered individual learning plans to facilitate 'fast tracking' of learners, for example where emigration or pregnancy might prevent completion. • Some providers with good information technology resources have made individual learning plans available online, which can be updated. Sections can be printed for reference where access to computers is limited. • Quality improvement systems such as internal audit and review focusing on how well plans are completed and how they may be improved in the future. Good practice is noted and shared across the provider.

Learning and Development Plan Learning and Development Policy • through an effective learning and development plan consistent with the principles of employment equity, it will encourage and assist all employees to: • •Acquire the knowledge and skills required to maximize their performance in their current positions; • •Acquire new competencies in response to, or in preparation for, changing job requirements or new job opportunities; • •Develop or redirect their careers as individual or organizational needs change; • •Acquire knowledge and understanding respecting issues of fairness, equity, and human rights. Learning and development are shared responsibilities, and all employees are responsible for contributing to this undertaking. All decisions to engage in learning must be the product of discussion between the employee and the employee's supervisor

Learning and Development Plan (cont.) Learning and Development Action Plan It is understood that various elements of this plan will require further consultation, referral and planning with existing university units that will be responsible for program delivery. For example: • Academic Computing Services • Continuing Studies • Employment Equity • Financial Services • Human Resources • Occupational Health and Safety For each goal set out in the Policy, a number of actions are defined below and the initial responsibility for each action is attributed to individuals or bodies.

How to Interview Potential Employees As your business grows, you will eventually find the need to hire employees. Having a good employee can be a valuable asset to your business, one which will allow your business to grow and profit. However, hiring the wrong employee can lead to disaster. The most important part of hiring an employee is the interview process. The questions you ask and the responses you are given are often the most important factor in determining if an individual is good for your company. Once you have a handful of prospects, its time to begin the interview process. For some people this is a difficult task. When you first meet the prospect and shake their hand, you will get a good idea of how confident they are. You want an employee who is confident, and can work well under pressure. Try to avoid asking questions which can be answered with a simple "no" or "yes". Ask questions which will force the person to go into details about themselves and their abilities. You don't want planned responses. You want real answers. Ask them questions about what type of supervisor makes them work hard, or what would be the perfect job for them. Find out how they manage their time, and where they plan on being five or ten years from now. These are powerful questions which will force them to give real answers, answers that will give you a solid of idea of whether or not they would be good for your company

How to Interview Potential Employees (cont.) One of the most important things you should want to know is why they want to work for you. What qualities does your business have which attracted them? These are also good questions which will determine if they are a good candidate. If they seem to hesitate to talk about certain things, this is often a bad sign. You also want to be wary of candidates who say terrible things about their former employers. You want to look for employees who will ask you questions. Someone who asks questions about their employer shows that they can think for themselves, and this is the type of person you should want working for you. You don't want an employee you have to micromanage. When the interview comes to a conclusion, tell them when they can expect to hear from you. Hiring employees are one of the most important factors in the success or failure of your business. You want to work with people who you know will enhance your business, and who can think independently.

Questions You May Use • What five adjectives describe you best? • Why should I consider you for this position? • Why are you the best candidate for this position? • Tell me about the one thing in your life you're proudest of. • You've changed jobs frequently. What makes you think that this position will be different? • What qualities do you think are necessary to make a success of this job? • Describe your ideal job. • How did you find out about this job? • What do you know about the job? • What do you know about the UTSA/this department?

Questions You May Use (cont.) • Is there anything that will prevent you from getting to work on time? • Is there anything that will prevent you from working the job’s regular hours? • What kinds of work interest you the most? • What interests you most about this position? • How do you feel about your present workload? • What motivates you to do your best work? • How can we best help you get your job done? • Tell me about a time you went “out on a limb” to get the job done. • What are the disadvantages of this line of work? • What do you find most frustrating at work?

Questions You May Use (cont.) • Tell me about a project that got you really excited. • How do you define doing a good job? • What makes a job enjoyable for you? • Under what conditions do you work best? • What is your greatest strength/weakness or deficiency? • Tell me about a work task you enjoy. • Tell me about your last position and what you did. • Tell me about the last time you made a mistake and how you corrected it. • If you don't leave your current job, what will happen there? How far can you advance? • Of all the work you have done, where have you been most successful?

Questions You May Use (cont.) • What types of office equipment have you used? • Tell me about the types of word processing you did on your last job. • What would you say are the major technical skills needed for this position? • How do you merge a file in Microsoft Word? • What certifications/classes have you completed this last year? Were any of them required by your supervisor? • Describe the types of documents you deal with on a daily basis. • What software programs do you use most often in your current position? • Describe in detail your experience with computer software programs. • Give me an example of a technical problem you had to solve. How did you implement the solution? • Tell me about the PowerPoint presentations you have developed.

team learning plan. Information on Team Learning Plan (TLP) • The Team Learning Plan (TLP) is developed following a thorough assessment of team skills and knowledge relative to its current and prospective requirements. The Team Learning Plan governs and subsumes Individual Learning Plans, and designates team learning and development priorities and strategies. The Team Learning Plan highlights that team member learning and development is a team responsibility, not a private affair between individuals and their supervisor. Learning options for you and your team • Learning Solutions can assist you to identify and meet the development needs of your team. Your learning advisor will work with you to design a customised learning solution to support you and your team and to assist you in meeting your goals.

Learning options We can tailor programs for teams who are: • •undergoing restructures or change initiatives • •working to define their vision, values and key behaviours • •developing a strategic plan • •seeking to improve communication and engagement • •needing to improve efficiency and responsiveness to internal and external clients • •building a new team or introducing a new leader to the team Our solutions can include: • •facilitation of strategic planning sessions • •customised versions of courses run in Learning Solutions open program • •programs designed to meet specific needs – particularly in the area of building effective teams • •assistance to establish mentoring programs

team’s performance It’s important to understand that team members want regular feedback on their performance. The formal performance review is an important component but it shouldn’t be the only one. Mind you, many firms also struggle to conduct the formal performance review effectively. What is needed is a mechanism where team members receive quality feedback throughout the year. Personally, Due to the heavy, unrelenting workload associated with tax and accounting compliance, when a job is completed most firms do not conduct any review of how well the job was done and what could be done in the future to improve. The tendency is to run straight to the next job. Instead, why don’t you take 10 minutes at the end of each job and sit down with the team member who did the work and conduct a quick review: • What did we do well? This is the chance to provide positive feedback to the team member. • What didn’t we do well? This is a chance to provide some constructive feedback as to how the team member could improve. Mind you the answer to this question might also be that the reviewer needs to improve their performance !!

team’s performance • How can we do the job better next year? For example are there some processes we need to improve? • How might we get the client better organised in the future so that we can do the work more efficiently? • What should be the time budget for this job next year? It’s much easier to set the time budget when the work is fresh in your mind. • You could also give the job a mark of 10. What do you think would be the reaction of a team member if their job received a mark of 6 out of 10? Most, I think, would ask what they need to do to get a 7 or and 8. This provides a focus on how we can improve. Some firms are starting to use these scores as a way of assessing performance to assist in promotion assessments and salary review. Of course the result of these reviews will often be some actions such as reviewing some processes, conducting some training, communicating with the client. A system will need to be implemented to ensure these actions are not lost. The end result is better feedback to team members with the added benefit of work being organised more effectively in a future.

training and other development Key points In general staff felt that although there was in theory a commitment to training in higher education, the institutions they worked for had very little to offer in terms of staff development and career progression. • Few staff had received formal training despite the changes to their work roles. • New professional staff were more likely to feel that their training needs were taken seriously than other staff. But this tended to be an advantage only in the short term. • Most staff experienced practical obstacles to obtaining the training they felt they needed. • The biggest obstacles were reduced funding for training, spending priorities and the lack of time to undertake training. Further qualifications: several members of staff were studying for further qualifications which they did largely in their own time and at their own expense. • The majority were working towards an academic rather than a vocational qualification although they were not working in academic-related posts. • They did this because they felt that academics lacked respect for vocational qualifications and would not take them seriously without academic qualifications.

training and other development (cont.) Staff development: most administrative and support staff did not feel that their institutions were committed to staff development. • 'Pre-1992 universities' often did not have appraisal procedures for administrative and support staff. • Staff in '1992 universities', where appraisal procedures were more advanced, often experienced a tension between the increased expectations generated by appraisal and the opportunities available to fulfil them. • Again, new professionals had more positive experiences of appraisal and opportunities for staff development. Career progression: staff expressed most frustration over their opportunities for career progression within higher education. • The majority felt that they had no opportunities for progression at all. • They identified the structure of higher education and lack of funding as the major constraints on their career progression. • Many believed that the only way to progress was to move between higher education institutions or to look outside the sector.

training and other development (cont.) Opportunities for training • The administrative and support staff reported markedly similar experiences in terms of their opportunities for training. However, some distinctions between staff were apparent. The new professionals reported slightly more favourable experiences of training provision than the niche-finders or subject specialists. The new professionals had experienced a stronger commitment to their training than other staff. None of them had actually been offered training but when they had identified their training needs, their managers had been very supportive. One explained: '... when I was appointed... I was offered no training at all through the university, so it was up to me to go and find it, which I did. But then they paid for it... they were fine.' • Overall new professionals had encountered fewer obstacles to obtaining training and were less likely than other staff to have had requests for training refused. This was probably because they were working in newly created or rapidly expanding posts which were viewed favourably and were perceived as making an important contribution to higher education. As a consequence, managers viewed the provision of training for these posts as a sensible investment rather than a drain on resources.

training and other development (cont.) • Nevertheless, this distinction did not work across the board. Better access to training was short-lived, even for new professionals. One or two new professionals who had been in post for more than two or three years and whose posts were more firmly established, clearly found themselves facing similar obstacles to the niche-finders and subject specialists. It is likely that providing a favourable training environment for some new professionals was a pragmatic response to ensure that the new growth areas of higher education, which were generally the focus of management scrutiny, could be developed to their fullest capacity. Once this had been achieved and the preoccupation of managers had shifted, new professionals faced the same training environment as other administrative and support staff. Obstacles in training provision • The majority of the administrative and support staff, however, reported a number of practical obstacles in relation to training. Most had received little training in recent years. More important, very few felt they had received the amount of training they needed to keep on top of their work. They perceived this lack of training to be particularly problematic given the rate of change they were experiencing in their jobs and the increased responsibilities many had taken on. These problems affected the vast majority of staff regardless of their area of work or institution type.

training and other development (cont.) • Funding for training had become increasingly constrained and was reportedly the biggest obstacle in accessing training. A junior member of technical support staff said: '... we are encouraged to go, but I want to do a computer technicians' course, and the cost is so high for the department... There is encouragement to do it provided it doesn't cost too much.' • Staff were finding it more and more difficult to attend externally run training courses which were usually more expensive than university-run courses. They were unable to attend external courses where equivalent internal courses were available. Yet, they felt that internal courses were often not run to the same standard as training courses in the private sector. In addition, some staff had to wait for long periods for cheaper alternatives to become available. And several staff had experienced problems in gaining access to oversubscribed internal training courses. • This was especially problematic for technical and computing support staff. Many of the courses they wanted to attend were particularly expensive because of the IT-intensive nature of their training needs. A member of computing support staff explained:

training and other development (cont.) 'I think it's very difficult for us to justify commercial courses, costing over a thousand [pounds] for a few days, [even though they're better courses]..It's mainly when there's a university running them which are nice and cheap.' • Yet the training needs of computing and support staff were often so specialised that it was not cost-effective to organise internal courses. These staff were acutely aware that they had lost touch with many developments in their field. • Several staff expressed the view that the training needs of administrative and support staff lacked recognition compared to other staff working in higher education. They believed that when training budgets were tight, training in management, research and academic skills was given priority over training in administrative and support functions. This was a particular problem for staff who worked in institutions where training budgets have been devolved to department level. These staff spoke of a 'Cinderella effect', whereby they came at the bottom of the list when training budgets were allocated and so were often forgotten. They also believed that their managers knew too little about their area of work to make informed decisions about their training needs.

training and other development (cont.) Training for qualifications • Given that the staff who took part in the group discussions were working in educational institutions it is not surprising that a large proportion of them were studying towards further qualifications. This group largely comprised technical support staff or administrators who came into most contact with academic staff. Computing support staff and librarians tended to be more concerned with keeping up with technological developments in their fields. • The staff studying for a qualification reported that they received financial or intellectual support from their institutions only if their courses were considered to be directly of benefit to their department. As a result, most were self-financing and were studying outside their workplace. Some administrative and support staff, particularly the longer-serving staff, expressed surprise and discontent over the requirement for value for money in supporting training for qualifications. They expressed a general belief that universities should support 'learning for its own sake'. They felt that supporting training purely on a value-for-money basis was contrary to the aims and objectives of higher education.

Monitoring and Evaluation What is monitoring and evaluation? Although the term “monitoring and evaluation” tends to get run together as if it is only one thing, monitoring and evaluation are, in fact, two distinct sets of organisational activities, related but not identical. Monitoring is the systematic collection and analysis of information as a project progresses. It is aimed at improving the efficiency and effectiveness of a project or organisation. It is based on targets set and activities planned during the planning phases of work. It helps to keep the work on track, and can let management know when things are going wrong. If done properly, it is an invaluable tool for good management, and it provides a useful base for evaluation. It enables you to determine whether the resources you have available are sufficient and are being well used, whether the capacity you have is sufficient and appropriate, and whether you are doing what you planned to do.

Monitoring and Evaluation (cont.) Evaluation is the comparison of actual project impacts against the agreed strategic plans. It looks at what you set out to do, at what you have accomplished, and how you accomplished it. It can be formative (taking place during the life of a project or organisation, with the intention of improving the strategy or way of functioning of the project or organisation). It can also be summative (drawing learning from a completed project or an organisation that is no longer functioning). Someone once described this as the difference between a check-up and an autopsy! What monitoring and evaluation have in common is that they are geared towards learning from what you are doing and how you are doing it, by focusing on: • Efficiency • Effectiveness • Impact

Monitoring and Evaluation (cont.) Efficiency tells you that the input into the work is appropriate in terms of the output. This could be input in terms of money, time, staff, equipment and so on. When you run a project and are concerned about its replicability or about going to scale, then it is very important to get the efficiency element right. Effectiveness is a measure of the extent to which a development programme or projectachieves the specific objectives it set. If, for example, we set out to improve the qualifications of all the high school teachers in a particular area, did we succeed? Impact tells you whether or not what you did made a difference to the problem situation you were trying to address. In other words, was your strategy useful? Did ensuring that teachers were better qualified improve the pass rate in the final year of school? Before you decide to get bigger, or to replicate the project elsewhere, you need to be sure that what you are doing makes sense in terms of the impact you want to achieve. From this it should be clear that monitoring and evaluation are best done when there has been proper planning against which to assess progress and achievements. There are three toolkits in this set that deal with planning – the overview of planning, strategic planning and action planning.

Monitoring and Evaluation (cont.) WHY DO MONITORING AND EVALUATION? Monitoring and evaluation enable you to check the “bottom line” (see Glossary of Terms) of development work: Not “are we making a profit?” but “are we making a difference?” Through monitoring and evaluation, you can: • Review progress; • Identify problems in planning and/or implementation; • Make adjustments so that you are more likely to “make a difference”. In many organisations, “monitoring and evaluation” is something that that is seen as a donor requirement rather than a management tool. Donors are certainly entitled to know whether their money is being properly spent, and whether it is being well spent. But the primary (most important) use of monitoring and evaluation should be for the organisation or project itself to see how it is doing against objectives, whether it is having an impact, whether it is working efficiently, and to learn how to do it better.

Monitoring and Evaluation (cont.) Plans are essential but they are not set in concrete (totally fixed). If they are not working, or if the circumstances change, then plans need to change too. Monitoring and evaluation are both tools which help a project or organisation know when plans are not working, and when circumstances have changed. They give management the information it needs to make decisions about the project or organisation, about changes that are necessary in strategy or plans. Through this, the constants remain the pillars of the strategic framework: the problem analysis, the vision, and the values of the project or organisation. Everything else is negotiable. (See also the toolkit on strategic planning) Getting something wrong is not a crime. Failing to learn from past mistakes because you are not monitoring and evaluating, is. Monitoring and evaluation can: • Help you identify problems and their causes; • Suggest possible solutions to problems; • Raise questions about assumptions and strategy; • Push you to reflect on where you are going and how you are getting there;

Monitoring and Evaluation (cont.) • Provide you with information and insight; • Encourage you to act on the information and insight; • Increase the likelihood that you will make a positive development difference. MORE ABOUT MONITORING AND EVALUATION Monitoring involves: • Establishing indicators (See Glossary of Terms) of efficiency, effectiveness and impact; • Setting up systems to collect information relating to these indicators; • Collecting and recording the information; • Analysing the information; • Using the information to inform day-to-day management. Monitoring is an internal function in any project or organisation.

Monitoring and Evaluation (cont.) Evaluation involves: • Looking at what the project or organisation intended to achieve – what difference did it want to make? What impact did it want to make? • Assessing its progress towards what it wanted to achieve, its impact targets. • Looking at the strategy of the project or organisation. Did it have a strategy? Was it effective in following its strategy? Did the strategy work? If not, why not? • Looking at how it worked. Was there an efficient use of resources? What were the opportunity costs of the way it chose to work? How sustainable is the way in which the project or organisation works? What are the implications for the various stakeholders in the way the organisation works. Planning for monitoring and evaluation Monitoring and evaluation should be part of your planning process. It is very difficult to go back and set up monitoring and evaluation systems once things have begun to happen. You need to begin gathering information about performance and in relation to targets from the word go. The first information gathering should, in fact,

Planning for monitoring and evaluation take place when you do your needs assessment. This will give you the information you need against which to assess improvements over time. When you do your planning process, you will set indicators. These indicators provide the framework for your monitoring and evaluation system. They tell you what you want to know and the kinds of information it will be useful to collect. In this section we look at: • What do we want to know? This includes looking at indicators for both internal issues and external issues. • Different kinds of information. • How will we get information? • Who should be involved?

WHAT DO WE WANT TO KNOW? What we want to know is linked to what we think is important. In development work, what we think is important is linked to our values. Most work in civil society organisations is underpinned by a value framework. It is this framework that determines the standards of acceptability in the work we do. The central values on which most development work is built are: • Serving the disadvantaged; • Empowering the disadvantaged; • Changing society, not just helping individuals; • Sustainability; • Efficient use of resources. So, the first thing we need to know is: Is what we are doing and how we are doing it meeting the requirements of these values? In order to answer this question, our monitoring and evaluation system must give us information about:

WHAT DO WE WANT TO KNOW? (cont.) • Who is benefiting from what we do? How much are they benefiting? • Are beneficiaries passive recipients or does the process enable them to have some control over their lives? • Are there lessons in what we are doing that have a broader impact than just what is happening on our project? • Can what we are doing be sustained in some way for the long-term, or will the impact of our work cease when we leave? • Are we getting optimum outputs for the least possible amount of inputs? DIFFERENT KINDS OF INFORMATION – QUANTITATIVE AND QUALITATIVE Information used in monitoring and evaluation can be classified as: • Quantitative; or • Qualitative.

DIFFERENT KINDS OF INFORMATION Qualitative measurement tells you how people feel about a situation or about how things are done or how people behave. So, for example, although you might discover that 50% of the teachers in a school are unhappy about the assessment criteria used, this is still qualitative information, not quantitative information. You get qualitative information by asking, observing, interpreting. Some people find quantitative information comforting – it seems solid and reliable and “objective”. They find qualitative information unconvincing and “subjective”. It is a mistake to say that “quantitative information speaks for itself”. It requires just as much interpretation in order to make it meaningful as does qualitative information. It may be a “fact” that enrolment of girls at schools in some developing countries is dropping – counting can tell us that, but it tells us nothing about why this drop is taking place. In order to know that, you would need to go out and ask questions – to get qualitative information. Choice of indicators is also subjective, whether you use quantitative or qualitative methods to do the actual measuring. Researchers choose to measure school enrolment figures for girls because they believe that this tells them something about how women in a society are treated or viewed.

HOW WILL WE GET INFORMATION? The monitoring and evaluation process requires a combination of quantitative and qualitative information in order to be comprehensive. For example, we need to know what the school enrolment figures for girls are, as well as why parents do or do not send their children to school. Perhaps enrolment figures are higher for boys than for girls because a particular community sees schooling as a luxury and prefers to train boys to do traditional and practical tasks such taking care of animals. In this case, the higher enrolment of girls does not necessarily indicate higher regard for girls. HOW WILL WE GET INFORMATION? This is dealt with in some detail in the toolkit on action planning, in the section on monitoring, collecting information as you go along. Your methods for information collecting need to be built into your action planning. You should be aiming to have a steady stream of information flowing into the project or organisation about the work and how it is done, without overloading anyone. The information you collect must mean something: don’t collect information to keep busy, only do it to find out what you want to know, and then make sure that you store the information in such a way that it is easy to access.

HOW WILL WE GET INFORMATION? (cont.) Usually you can use the reports, minutes, attendance registers, financial statements that are part of your work anyway as a source of monitoring and evaluation information. However, sometimes you need to use special tools that are simple but useful to add to the basic information collected in the natural course of your work. Some of the more common ones are: • Case studies • Recorded observation • Recording and analysis of important incidents (called “critical incident analysis”) • Structured questionnaires • One-on-one interviews • Focus groups • Sample surveys • Systematic review of relevant official statistics.

WHO SHOULD BE INVOLVED? Almost everyone in the organisation or project will be involved in some way in collecting information that can be used in monitoring and evaluation. This includes: • The administrator who takes minutes at a meeting or prepares and circulates the attendance register; • The fieldworkers who writes reports on visits to the field; • The bookkeeper who records income and expenditure. In order to maximise their efforts, the project or organisation needs to: • Prepare reporting formats that include measurement, either quantitative or qualitative, of important indicators. For example, if you want to know about community participation in activities, or women’s participation specifically, structure the fieldworkers reporting format so that s/he has to comment on this, backing up observations with facts. • Prepare recording formats that include measurement, either quantitative or qualitative, of important indicators. For example, if you want to know how many men and how many women attended a meeting, include a gender column on your attendance list.

WHO SHOULD BE INVOLVED? (cont.) • Record information in such a way that it is possible to work out what you need to know. For example, if you need to know whether a project is sustainable financially, and which elements of it cost the most, then make sure that your bookkeeping records reflect the relevant information. It is a useful principle to look at every activity and say: What do we need to know about this activity, both process (how it is being done) and product (what it is meant to achieve), and what is the easiest way to find it out and record it as we go along? Designing a monitoring and/or evaluation process As there are differences between the design of a monitoring system and that of an evaluation process, we deal with them separately here. • Under monitoring we look at the process an organisation could go through to design a monitoring system. • Under evaluation we look at: Purpose, Key evaluation questions and Methodology. Thank you.

Develop teams and individuals BSBLED401A