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Strategy has emerged as a watchword of modern change efforts. Calls to be strategic are sounded in the private sector, government, philanthropy, and the not-for-profit sectors. Management experts stress the importance of strategic thinking. Change agents are urged to act strategically. Strategic planning has long been a mainstay of organizational development. Leaders in all sectors talk not about theories of change or logic models, but about being strategic: Strategic thinking. Strategic planning. Strategic results. Being strategic. Strategy execution. Effective strategies. Adapting strategically. And, now, evaluating strategy. But strategy is a new unit of analysis for evaluation. Traditionally, evaluation has focused on projects, programs, products, policies, and personnel. What does it mean to treat strategy as the evaluation focus, as the thing evaluated? What is strategy? How does one evaluate strategy? What are the implications of this new direction for evaluation theory, methods, practice, and, ultimately, use? This issue examines these questions and provides examples of strategy-focused evaluations. Evaluating strategy is not about evaluating strategic planning, or even strategic plans. It's about evaluating strategy itself. Strategy is the evaluand. That poses new challenges and offers new opportunities to meet the information needs of evaluation users. For evaluation to be relevant to decision makers and leaders, the focus of the evaluation must be on what they are concerned about and what they care about. Increasingly, they care about identifying and implementing effective strategies. That's where evaluation enters the picture. Evaluating strategy has the purpose of making strategy more effective, differentiating effective from ineffective strategies, and contributing to the ongoing development and adaptation of strategy in response to changing conditions and real-world complexities. Evaluating strategy is a new direction for evaluation, one that is likely to take on increasing importance--if evaluators learn to do it well. This issue takes up that challenge. This is the 128th volume of the Jossey-Bass quarterly report series New Directions for Evaluation, an official publication of the American Evaluation Association.
Program Theory-Driven Evaluation Science fills the gap between 21st century literature on evaluation and what is happening in practice. It features detailed examples of how evaluations actually unfold in practice to develop people, programs, and organizations. Commonly accepted strategies for practicing evaluation are outlined, followed by comprehe
The second edition of the Impact Evaluation in Practice handbook is a comprehensive and accessible introduction to impact evaluation for policy makers and development practitioners. First published in 2011, it has been used widely across the development and academic communities. The book incorporates real-world examples to present practical guidelines for designing and implementing impact evaluations. Readers will gain an understanding of impact evaluations and the best ways to use them to design evidence-based policies and programs. The updated version covers the newest techniques for evaluating programs and includes state-of-the-art implementation advice, as well as an expanded set of examples and case studies that draw on recent development challenges. It also includes new material on research ethics and partnerships to conduct impact evaluation. The handbook is divided into four sections: Part One discusses what to evaluate and why; Part Two presents the main impact evaluation methods; Part Three addresses how to manage impact evaluations; Part Four reviews impact evaluation sampling and data collection. Case studies illustrate different applications of impact evaluations. The book links to complementary instructional material available online, including an applied case as well as questions and answers. The updated second edition will be a valuable resource for the international development community, universities, and policy makers looking to build better evidence around what works in development.
This open access book clarifies confusions of strategy that have existed for nearly 40 years through the core thoughts of three fundamental elements. Unlike the traditional definition of strategy as "a plan to achieve a long-term goal from overall considerations”in a linear view, this book defines strategy from non-linear viewpoint as it is in the real world. The art of a strategy lies not only in the determination of development goals, but also in the identification of development problems and putting forward overall guiding ideology of solving problems. Rich illustrations as well as numerous business and military cases are presented in helping readers to understand the fundamental elements of strategy.The general scope of the book includes introductions to the three fundamental elements of strategy, three-sub decisions of a complete strategic decision, incomplete strategies, relationship between tactic and strategy, three elements of competitive and corporative strategies. There may be biases in company-level, real strategic decision-making which makes a complete strategy not necessarily a perfect one. The book introduces biases and reasons for the biases, helping industrial strategic decision-makers understand the importance of knowing the nature of the company, the industry and its environment. In addition, this book also presents principles and evaluation approaches of strategic decisions, explores the reasons for the excessive definitions of the strategy concept, and discusses directions of future’s research tasks.The book will benefit business managers who are interested in knowing what a complete strategic decision is and how to avoid errors or biases in strategic decision-making. It also benefits students in business schools (especially in MBA/EMBA programs) who are (or will be) on executive positions. Academic researchers may find it is interesting to understand strategy from the view of the three elements. The new view provides a novel insight into strategy and promotes several research directions in the future. The three elements of strategy are also applicable to military strategies and readers who are interested in military and may find its value as well.
From making presentations to general versus technical/academic audiences to preparing computerized presentations, this book shows you how to create more effective verbal and written survey reports.
If you have a working knowledge of Haskell, this hands-on book shows you how to use the language’s many APIs and frameworks for writing both parallel and concurrent programs. You’ll learn how parallelism exploits multicore processors to speed up computation-heavy programs, and how concurrency enables you to write programs with threads for multiple interactions. Author Simon Marlow walks you through the process with lots of code examples that you can run, experiment with, and extend. Divided into separate sections on Parallel and Concurrent Haskell, this book also includes exercises to help you become familiar with the concepts presented: Express parallelism in Haskell with the Eval monad and Evaluation Strategies Parallelize ordinary Haskell code with the Par monad Build parallel array-based computations, using the Repa library Use the Accelerate library to run computations directly on the GPU Work with basic interfaces for writing concurrent code Build trees of threads for larger and more complex programs Learn how to build high-speed concurrent network servers Write distributed programs that run on multiple machines in a network
An effective state is essential to achieving socio-economic and sustainable development. With the advent of globalization, there are growing pressures on governments and organizations around the world to be more responsive to the demands of internal and external stakeholders for good governance, accountability and transparency, greater development effectiveness, and delivery of tangible results. Governments, parliaments, citizens, the private sector, NGOs, civil society, international organizations and donors are among the stakeholders interested in better performance. As demands for greater accountability and real results have increased, there is an attendant need for enhanced results-based monitoring and evaluation of policies, programs, and projects. This Handbook provides a comprehensive ten-step model that will help guide development practitioners through the process of designing and building a results-based monitoring and evaluation system. These steps begin with a OC Readiness AssessmentOCO and take the practitioner through the design, management, and importantly, the sustainability of such systems. The Handbook describes each step in detail, the tasks needed to complete each one, and the tools available to help along the way."
This book helps practicing evaluators design and conduct competent evaluation studies, while explicitly considering resource and data constraints. The book is organized around a seven-step model developed by the authors, and which has been tested and refined in workshops that cater to a broad spectrum of evaluation practitioners. Vignettes from practice and case studies, representing evaluations from a variety of geographic regions and sectors, demonstrate adaptive possibilities for small projects with budgets of a few thousand dollars, or timelines as brief as a few days, to large-scale, long-term evaluations with multi-million-dollar budgets. The text is specifically designed to incorporate quantitative, qualitative, and mixed-method designs.