13. Monitoring and evaluation

How to evaluate your appraisal and project implementation and use the results to help future appraisals. Monitoring and evaluation are a part of the responsible and transparent management of public resources for implementing strategic plans and individual projects.

Monitoring

Monitoring is the collection of data, both during and after project implementation to improve current and future decision making. It should be a part of your project design and implementation.

Well-designed data collection and monitoring:

  • enables you to identify threats to implementation
  • encourages greater accountability
  • supports provision of high-quality evaluation evidence
  • provides an improved knowledge base to inform future policies, plans and strategies if monitoring continues post-implementation
  • improves learning where innovative techniques or measures have been used
  • may be essential to implement timely adaptive measures
  • helps manage the consequence of uncertainties within your FCERM approach
  • informs understanding of benefits realisation

How appraisal contributes to monitoring

There are 8 components of your appraisal that can contribute to a good monitoring strategy and programme:

  1. strategic context – use SMART objectives so you can monitor progress
  2. defined baseline – you need to understand the baseline so you can monitor performance against your objectives
  3. risk register – so you clearly identify and mitigate risks
  4. environmental assessments – so you can monitor planning consent and licence conditions linked to environmental legislation
  5. benefits register and cost schedule – so you can compare predicted costs and benefits to actual value and update longer term predictions
  6. project time horizon – so you can check your assumption about timing of events within and after your project
  7. financial schedules – so you can check your project income and expenditure
  8. adaptive pathways – so you can check your future interventions manage risks over the life of your project

Evaluation

Evaluation is the systematic assessment of an intervention’s design, implementation and outcomes.

The 2 main purposes for carrying out an evaluation are learning and accountability. Learning is where you get an understanding of what works and why. Accountability is where you evaluate your project to show how effective your intervention is.

You can do an evaluation before, during or after implementation of a project. There are 2 types of evaluation.

Process evaluation

You should use process evaluation to understand the internal processes used to achieve outputs, alongside what was achieved and when.

You should assess:

  • whether an intervention is being implemented as intended within agreed budgets
  • whether the design is working
  • what is working, what is not working and why

Impact evaluation

You should use impact evaluation to understand the intended and unintended effects of outputs, as well as how well you achieved SMART objectives.

You should test:

  • what changes have taken place
  • the extent of those changes
  • whether the changes can be attributed to the intervention
  • a comparison of benefits to costs

You should be able to make a proportionate assessment of your project impacts to the:

  • environment
  • sustainability of FCERM and the place
  • local community, partners, and stakeholders
  • use of any new, novel, or innovative measures or approaches

Your appraisal outputs must be fully transparent and auditable so that the project and its outcomes can be evaluated.

There is guidance on conducting evaluations in the HM Treasury Magenta Book.

Read the full technical guidance

If you need to understand the full technical content you should see section 13 – monitoring and evaluation in the FCERM technical guidance.