PME: Project and Programme Planning, Monitoring, and Evaluation ... and learning

A former PME cynic

I am a self-confessed born-again PME evangelist. Like many of those who have "seen the light" I was once highly sceptical about the value of PME (in particular the "E" part of the acronym. I could always see the wisdom in flexible planning frameworks and focused monitoring). In my early days as a project manager, I treated evaluations as an exercise in compliance, form filling in, box ticking, call it what you will. "Useful evaluation" sounded like an oxymoron to me in those dark days. It was right up there with such classics as "just war", "military intelligence" and "anarchist leader"! In my defence, the evaluations I encountered resembled those Michael Quinn Patton described in his "Rant on Widespread Evaluation Nonsense" (See pages 66-67 of Patton (2010), Developmental Evaluation). The following excerpt from the aforementioned rant summed up my feelings about evaluation at the time: 

To Logframes ... and beyond

In 1999 I wrote my first logframe - for the $750,000 World Bank-Global Environment Facility Medium-Sized Project for the restoration of Round Island, Mauritius. That's when I started to see the potential of PME as a force for good, not (just) a dastardly device designed to complicate the lives of project managers worldwide. It was my first logframe of many, containing my first M&E plan of many, accompanied by my first Gantt chart of many. 

The clear and simple logic of the logframe appealed to me, and I enthusiastically facilitated training courses and one-to-one sessions to teach fellow project managers the theory and practice of the logical framework approach. But despite my best efforts, many of those I trained struggled to implement the approaches we worked through together. This stimulated me to ask two questions: 1. Are the difficulties encountered due to my teaching (implementation failure)? 2. Are there inherent qualities in the logframe that do not resonate with some people (theory failure)?

The answer to question one was yes and no. People I trained identified an issue with my training that is common to many approaches that lack sufficient sustained engagement. The training could not anticipate all the issues inevitably encountered during implementation. Clearly, insufficient follow-up was an issue, and experiential learning, while effective in some cases, could have been greatly improved with a little mentoring support. 

Those I spoke to also had issues with the logframe. First, the typical assumptions stated in the logframe (low staff turnover, institutional support, political stability, etc.) were often not met. So how does this affect implementation? Another commonly stated issue was the difficulty in demonstrating the link between project outputs, outcomes and impacts - how could those implementing the project ascribe cause and effect amidst such complexity? 

These issues stimulated my search for complementary PME approaches that could reinforce or even replace the logframe as a planning model I talk about my (re)discovery of Outcome Mapping in 2010 in the section on my spiral path so I won't elaborate too much here. Suffice it to say my searches uncovered a plethora of tools, techniques and approaches too numerous to list. A wonderful resource for discovering the richness of PME approaches is the BetterEvaluation Rainbow Framework. It would probably take several lifetimes to master all the tools in the evaluation rainbow, but I am convinced that the issue is not about which methods are better but about which methods or mixtures of methods are applicable in any particular context. 

So, at work and in life, I am a pluralist, happy to sample from the rich buffet of approaches available based on needs and circumstances... and always willing to adapt to change!

Some of the planning, monitoring and evaluation activities I have been involved in are listed below: