What is monitoring and evaluation?
Monitoring and evaluation (M&E) is a way of collecting information to check how things are going over time. Although 'monitoring and evaluation' is often talked about as one activity, they are 2 separate things:
- Monitoring means regularly collecting information about your project so that you can identify trends or changes.
- Evaluation involves checking how well your project is meeting its goals.
Introduction to M&E
Monitoring and evaluation – the process
Expectations: what data will you be expected to provide, how often, and how long does that typically take?
When you prepare for your first service, we give you guidance on the data we expect you to collect. That typically involves counting inbound calls or emails, getting data from your back office system and running a survey of the team involved. We need that for a period of a month before launch and 2 to 3 months after.
When you are ready to pilot the full stack planning application or pre-app product set, we will expect you to start submitting monthly reports from your back office system. These typically take a week or two to set up and then an hour or two a month to run and check.
Successes: what benefits have councils experienced so far?
So far councils have been able to demonstrate a range of tangible benefits, for example:
- reducing inbound calls for find out if a planning permission - in fact eliminating the need for a planner to act as duty planner to take these calls.
a reduction in enforcement workload by reducing non-planning related complaints
Council officers involved in ODP use this information to justify their time investment to their line managers, and to encourage others to consider how these new products can be used to deliver improvements
Support: what help can you expect with monitoring and evaluation?
Representatives from the councils involved in ODP have formed a monitoring and evaluation working group. They support each other and work together to see what works best for collecting and using data, and to help develop guidance for councils new to ODP.
They offer:
- A series of short videos and guidance documents that give step-by-step explanations of what to do, and examples from their own experiences.
- For the data analysts in your teams, a range of data standards and templates, plus how to video tutorials and documents.
The group meets every week and newcomers are always welcome. It’s a friendly, inclusive gang of people who work in situations just like you and are always happy to answer your questions, talk you through any difficulties you may face, or maybe just give you reassurance you are doing the right thing.
Next steps: so what now?
- Take a look at some more of the M&E guidance pages here, and if you already know which service you are going to start with, watch the intro to M&E video for that - links shown in the Related Pages box below.
- Find out what level of technical resource is available to you in your council - do you have a back-office system administrator who can run reports, do you or someone in your team have data analyst skills perhaps with PowerBI? Or someone in your IT team? Point that person to this page.
- Come along to one of our weekly M&E working group calls and say hello
Related pages:
Report A Breach – Monitoring and Evaluation | Open Digital Planning
Find Out If You Need Planning Permission – Monitoring and Evaluation | Open Digital Planning
Apply for Planning Permission – Monitoring and Evaluation | Open Digital Planning
Pre-Application Advice – Monitoring and Evaluation | Open Digital Planning