Improving Programs through Evaluation-Based Performance Monitoring and Management
Rome, Italy
Dates: January 8-19, 2024
Course: PLCY689T
Even the best designed program can falter from poor implementation or management. Consequently, governments, multinational organizations, NGOs, and funders seek to improve program operations—using the tools of program evaluation to monitor program activities, outcomes, and costs. The most important tools they use include counterfactual identification, performance targets, and comparative effectiveness evaluations.
This, in turn, creates a demand for staff able to apply and interpret these tools of evaluation-based program monitoring. The course seeks to advance the skills and careers of participants by helping them understand and use these tools in real-world settings.
Students will learn how to:
• Formally assess the need to establish, modify, or expand a program (whether public or private)
• Use logic models to identify and operationalize key elements of performance indicators
• Collect and analyze data performance data for program monitoring
• Use counterfactuals, performance targets, and comparative effectiveness evaluations to gauge performance
• Estimate program costs (including total costs, cost-efficiency, cost effectiveness, and cost-benefit analysis)
• Apply the resulting data to improve program performance though management techniques and program adjustments and restructuring.
In addition to course instruction, the class will also visit senior officials of relevant Italian government offices, international organizations, and NGOs in Rome. The Rome meetings will include the Bank of Italy; Italian National Institute for the Evaluation of the Education and Training System (INVALSI); and The Italian Ministry of Economy and Finance.
A preliminary syllabus will be available on the course web page.
The course will culminate in the preparation of a set of performance measures for either an existing program familiar to the student, a proposed program, or a program that is suggested by the instructors. Students will prepare a logic model for the program, use the logic model to identify and define, operationalize performance measures, describe how data will be collected for the performance measures on an ongoing basis, and, for outcome measures, identify the method for identifying counterfactuals that will be used for each of the measures. Students will then evaluate each of the performance measures using criteria discussed in the course.
Classes will be in English.