Monitoring and Evaluation

The BD Center company offers possibility of conducting Monitoring, as well as Evaluation of projects co-funded by European Union. The main aim of our actions is to supply our customers with the data enabling collection of all objective information describing progress and effects of the project works. Constant control over work progress and the level of its advancement allows for gaining crucial knowledge and information enabling the customers to quickly launch correcting actions if deemed necessary.

Monitoring

Monitoring is a handy tool in the process of answering the question: did the project conclude successfully? Data coming from monitoring can be divided into those connected with funding (progress in realization of the financial plan) and the data illustrating both range and results of activities (physical progress).

Periodic, yearly and final reports serve as a means of informing the implementing institution about potential obstacles that might appear during project realization and transferring essential data.

Our research is characterized by objectiveness and reliability due to the usage of objective surveying indicators such as:

• inputs – means employed during project realization in order to reach planned targets and results. These might be: human resources, financial resources, stock, materials, etc…
• outputs – individual goods and services that are being created or will be created due to project’s realization
• results – direct and immediate effects felt by beneficiary due to product or program creation. Result indicators might reflect changes in behaviour, activity capabilities or beneficiaries’ activity efficiency
• impacts – project or program consequences surpassing direct and immediate effects for beneficiary

Evaluation

Evaluation is an assessment of the worth of public intervention, conducted according to the right criteria (performance, effectiveness, usefulness, accuracy and permanence) and project compliance in terms of established targets. Evaluation is based on specially collected and interpreted data by means of proper methodology.

Evaluation is a tool of systematical appraisal of the quality of the project implemented. It enables reflections upon current progress that makes it possible to systematically improve both performance, as well as effectiveness of actions taken during the project. Evaluation results conducted by BD Center serve as a means of improving project realization and its management. Thanks to observations conducted during the project evaluation it is possible to launch correcting actions within the project.

Our company utilizes 3 kinds of evaluation, depending on the time of its conducting:

• ex-ante evaluation – conducted before the project implementation
• mid-term evaluation – realized approximately in the middle of the program. It analyzes current results, as well as conducts the first program quality appraisal
• ex-post evaluation – conducted after the project’s end, yet not later that three years from that point. It’s aim is to inspect the longevity of the effects.

External evaluation is conducted by means of tools known from social research methodology. Their selection depends on research range, the type of project analyzed and kind of final beneficiary who is the project’s recipient.

The most popular methods employed when we conduct evaluation are:

• Analysis of project’s documents, i.e. all the documents connected with project realization (e.g. periodic monitoring reports or documents concerning administrative data) which helps to learn about the context of the evaluated project or its individual element
• Interviews (individual or collective) – serving as a tool for gathering information concerning different aspects of the evaluated project, as well as learning the opinion of people participating in the project’s realization and its members. This tool may be used either in the form of a informal discourse or a fully structuralized interview.
• Questionnaires – a method consisting in asking standard, precisely formulated questions and unequivocal questions formulated by means of questionnaire (poll), presented to a selected group of people participating in the project’s realization, as well as final beneficiaries.
• Observations – a planned, selective recording of various aspects of the project and its participants or makers. It may acquire specification of a ‘participating’ observation, where the researcher also plays a role of a participant of observed events or exterior observation. Observation enables more complex form of evaluation, being far more detailed than just opinions of project’s executors or participants.