Deborah is a highly successful, dynamic and influential evaluation professional with boundless energy that inspires wherever she goes - including many young people, as I observed when I had the pleasure of teaching earlier this year in her Executive Leadership Programme for Evaluation and the SDGs at the Claremont Evaluation Centre
My top tips are a bit different from those you have been reading about lately in this series. They're less about the intellectual process of becoming a great evaluator, and more about the things that facilitate (or detract from) the journey. I absolutely loved reading all of the
Others in this series will, I trust, give you useful technical tips on evaluation designs, methods, data collection and analytical techniques - the tools in the evaluator's toolbox. Here, however, is a set of hard-won and generally practical lessons to using those tools effectively as an evaluation practitioner.
Top Tip 1. Do not compromise your standards of integrity. Janis Joplin is famously quoted as saying, "Don't compromise yourself. You are all you've got." Be true to yourself. Do what you feel is right and honest in your work, though it may not
There is a lot to learn as a Young and Emerging Evaluator. You need to know methodological alternatives. You need to ground your work in evaluation standards, principles, and competencies. You need to keep up with new developments in the evaluation profession. You need to network and cultivate professional relationships.
For young and emerging evaluators there is plenty of advice about how to gain the necessary skills and knowledge, and how to get the right experience in evaluation. These technical aspects of evaluation are very important. A part of being an evaluation consultant, one that people rarely talk about, is
Unprecedented wildfires, deadly heatwaves, extraordinary floods, storms and droughts from California to Sweden, from Greece to Japan. The northern summer of 2018 has given us a preview of what the greenhouse world will look like, as countries and governments have become increasingly divided and inward looking, struggling to find solutions
Whatever methods and frameworks we use, we tend to rely on the scientific, the 'objective' data and evidence; we have been socialized to view it as the most reliable and honest evidence. We privilege this knowledge over other forms of knowledge, and so privilege the producers of scientific
While the five 'Top Ten Tips' in my previous post for Young and Emerging Evaluators (YEEs) related more to overall approaches to evaluation practice, the next five are intended to zoom in on a few technical matters that, as I advise people and organisations around the world, I
Given my 17-year long experience in evaluation, what are the top tips I would give to Young and Emerging Evaluators - the YEEs who will be responsible in future for the commissioning and doing of evaluations? We need change in our evaluation systems, so here are my first five priorities
