Management reviewThis is a featured page

ReviewLearning
No project or program is complete without a post-implementation review and a final report. Evaluating ongoing or completed Foresight projects or programs is essential to ensure accountability, credibility, and potential to stakeholders.

Just as important as the project or program outcomes is the ability to learn from successes and failures and pass these on to others conducting new studies. And, it’s important to be able to check the outcomes against the original objectives ensuring each has been achieved or explanations given and further actions noted to correct any perceived shortfalls or seize new opportunities.

Process
At its basic a post-implementation review can be as simple as the leader and/or team writing their view of the outcome. But, a better method is to interview, or survey, key actors and stakeholders for their evaluation. The object is not to start a witch hunt for the guilty but to create dialogue about what went right or wrong in non-personal terms so that learning can be diffused into the organization.

These post-implementation reviews should be readily available to any authorized person at any time. We provide the means to do this.

The review should consider all aspects of the project or program and give the opportunity for the sponsor(s) to formally sign off and add their own evaluation of the outcome(s).

The outcomes should be expressed in both quantitative and qualitative comparisons of results versus expected targets.

Programme review

Documentation
Each aspect should provide a short summary of the:
  • Results achieved
  • Strategic variances versus expectations
  • Lessons learned
  • Recommended next steps
There is no need to wait until the end of a project or program to begin creating the review; indeed, major benefit can be achieved by making the review an ongoing part of the process. Continuous review will highlight issues as they arise and create a process for determining corrective action. In effect, it becomes one of the team’s key project management documents and helps keep everyone on message. Unexpected benefits' "success stories" can be documented as the work progresses and used as examples of positive outcomes.

Lastly, continuous review means less work in going back in time, and people’s memory, to create the document as well as reducing a potentially significant workload for a team likely to be disbanded before the review is finished.

Further reference
Next: Foresight Futures Back: Foresight Development To: Shaping Tomorrow


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