Managing and Implementing an Evaluation: Guidelines and Tools for Evaluation Managers

Monitoring and evaluation are core responsibilities of American Red Cross and Catholic Relief Services (CRS) program managers and help ensure quality in programming. Managing and Implementing an Evaluation is one in a series of nine monitoring and evaluation (M&E) training and capacity-building modules that the American Red Cross and CRS have agreed to collaborate on under their respective Institutional Capacity Building Grants. These modules are designed to respond to field-identified needs for specific guidance and tools that did not appear to be available in existing publications. Although examples in the modules focus on Title II programming, the guidance and tools provided have value beyond the food-security realm.

Our intention in writing this module is to provide evaluation managers with solutions on how to implement evaluations. The evaluation manager, described in the Preparing for an Evaluation module, is generally a staff member in the operating country who has been given the additional responsibility of ensuring that a field evaluation moves smoothly from its initial terms of reference through the dissemination of the report’s findings. The module focuses on what needs to be done throughout the evaluation process to manage the evaluation team and minimize the inevitable disruptions to the project’s own implementation plan. The module thus provides examples and strategies to improve communication and coordination, combined with some basic vocabulary of methodological choices to understand why evaluations may require different approaches. The module emphasizes the similarities in managing evaluations, rather than those differences. However, managing the evaluation process is likely to be roughly the same, no matter when the evaluation occurs in a project or program cycle.

This module is part of a cluster of three in the overall series, primarily because the three topics flow neatly into the overall evaluation process itself. This cluster contains: Preparing for an Evaluation; Managing and Implementing an Evaluation; and Communicating and Reporting on an Evaluation.