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“Monitoring” is usually an internal activity
of project management aimed at determining whether projects
or programmes have been implemented as planned
“Evaluation”
is carried out either by project management or
by an external organisation. It is used to assess
and improve the performance of an ongoing programme,
or to estimate the impacts and determine the value
of the performance of completed projects or programmes.
Monitoring
and evaluation are important not only to ensure
that project milestones are reached, but also
to allow for the reassessment of objectives, strategies
and activities if circumstances dictate.
Ideally
evaluations assess actual project outputs, and
compare them to the planned outputs. Such evaluations
should be able to provide full details concerning
the effectiveness of a project: not only in terms
of the use of project resources, but also the
impact on the participants, and in addressing
the issues that the project was designed to address.
However, this is only possible if all project
aims, objectives, and activities have been defined
fully during the project planning and design stage.
Any
project can only be truly evaluated in terms of
how it reached the objectives that it set out
to achieve. If these objectives are not clearly
defined in the first place, then one can only
assess a project in general terms: "what
it achieved using the resources that were made
available to it". There is a big difference
between the two. Far too often so-called "evaluations"
fall into the second category: they are general
assessments. It is for these reasons that Democritus
can contribute to proper project and programme
planning as well as providing specialist Monitoring
and Evaluation expertise.
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