For nearly twenty years Canadian government agencies including the Federal Treasury Board, international organizations, NGOs, foreign governments and others have worked to enhance the ability to improve the performance and results produced by projects, programs, policies and/or other planned initiatives.
In its simples form, the focus of that effort has been on measuring ..... the effectiveness and efficiency of the use and application of inputs ----> to generate activities ------ > that produce outputs that yield ---> desired RESULTS AND IMPACTS. e.g. ingredients and skills for making a pie ----> lead to making of pie crust, preperation of fruit filling and baking of pie and
invitation of local newspaper food critic ---> that produces the dessert course of a multi-course dinner consumed by the food critic ----> that results in rave reviews in local newspaper that leads to an increase in business.
You can google RBM Treasury Board, Google Result Based Management or take a look at a good power point presentation at http://www.ccrda.org/files/54/files/CCRDA_RBM_Presentation.pdf It provides a bit of background to the genesis and present use of RBM if you are interested.
All this to let you in on a little secret...... From what I can see, neither ACOA or Economic Development are terribly interested in measuring results.... rather the process seems designed to be superficial, without any evidence of causal links between monies invested, activities initiated, outputs produced or impacts and results measuring social and/or economic development. Following is the one page document entitled "South West Shore Development Authority Summary of mid Year Review".
I invite you dear reader to take a look at SWSDA's web page and the 2009-2010 Plan laid out there at:
http://www.swsda.com/userfiles/ABusiness%20Plan%202009-2010%20for%20website(3).pdf
1. Problems you'll encounter include that Annex C identifed in the table of contents dealing with the evaluation of the program for 2008-2009 is not included in the SWSDA web page.... soooo no one knows what success they've claimed for what.
2. Their logic framework appears to be a toothless bastardized version of logic frameworks used in all these models by other organizations. That is because SWSDA and ACOA/Economic Development appear to be basing the conclusions they draw on what they call "measures of success" like lower unemployment.... without having to qualify or quantify what employment level changes are directly attributable to the investments/expenditures/action of SWSDA or even identifying what unemployment levels are presently..... what is missing is what folks call the causal link ..... determined by the measurement of OBJECTIVELY VERIFIABLE INDICATORS (OVIs).... for each impact, result, output, activity, or input identified.
UNFORTUNATELY THERE ISN'T AN OVI IN SIGHT IN EITHER SWSDA OR ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT'S MODELS......OR REPORTS.
