Massachusetts ODLG
Evaluation and Organizational Development
November 20, 2007
We invite you to contribute framing questions and resources for our discussion on November 20, 2007.
There are two ways you can do this...click on the "comment" button and add your comment or edit the wiki page. To edit or comment you will need the password: odlg
At the meeting on the 20th we will review and prioritize the questions for our discussion. We look forward to our conversation!!
Claire Reinelt and Ginger Fitzhugh (Facilitators)
Initial Framing Questions
- What should organizations evaluate (e.g., needs of their clients/constituents/customers, work climate, performance and effectiveness, leadership, networks)?
- What capacities, attitudes, processes, structures do organizations need to learn effectively?
- What skills do consultants need to perform OD and evaluation?
- How do organizations engage stakeholders in the evaluation process?
- What are the benefits and challenges of internal evaluation/external evaluation?
- How do OD interventions contribute to organizational development and change?
- How do OD consultants find ways to learn about the impact of their interventions given that they often leave an organization before the outcomes are known?
Framing Questions Added at the Meeting
- How do you evaluate beyond the "smile" sheet?
- How do you conduct evaluations that surface the underlying problems/tensions within an organization?
- What measures do organizations want to see? How do you show the links between desired long-term outcomes and intermediate measures?
- How do we identify tangible outcomes at multiple levels of impact that people will accept?
- How do we help organizations think about outcomes and what they want to evaluate?
- When people ask to do evaluation what do they really want to know?
Key Insights From the Conversation
- Doing evaluation in a participatory way is very akin to OD and uses many of the same techniques
- Developing logic models about why and how a program or other intervention will work helps organizations become more intentional about their outcomes and surfaces assumptions that people hold about why somehting will work. This process often leads to important conversations that can improve the program.
- Organizations need help to identify intermediate outcomes or proxy measures that they can have confidence in. When these measures are located within a logic model, organizations are likely to have more confidence in their validity because they are related to the longer term impacts they seek.
Organizational Learning and Evaluation Resources
Evaluation Guides and Handbooks
Evaluation Training and Professional Development Resources
They have a conference in New Jersey on April 13-15, 2008 on Evidence-Based Evaluation: Balancing Rigor, Relevance, and Reality
Their next conference is in Denver from November 5-8, 2008. Workshops are held before and after.
Comments (1)
Anonymous said
at 8:34 am on Nov 12, 2007
Seems to me that organizations should evaluate--systematically review--everything they do and the results that they get-or don't get.
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