Task 9 - Wrap up and review
A useful evaluation does not end with reporting or organisational insights, adaptation and improvement. A final task remains to support both ongoing evaluation and to improve evaluation practice across the APS learning.
Wrapping up the evaluation includes publishing your report, identifying any follow up actions to implement the evaluation recommendations, and reviewing the overall project to consider how well the evaluation achieved its objectives.
Publish and disseminate
Evaluation findings should be made transparent by default, unless there are good public policy reasons not to. Publication supports accountability, continuous improvement and helps to embed a culture of evaluation across the Commonwealth.
Each agency will have their own formal authorisation process for disseminating evaluation reports and related material which should be followed. There are many opportunities to contribute to the system-wide culture of learning by connecting with other people across APS learning such as the APS Academy and APS L&D Community of Practice, as well as evaluation networks and other forums.
Identify follow-up actions
A program management response should be articulated to convey whether each recommendation in the evaluation report is accepted, partially accepted or rejected. If the recommendation is rejected, a reason why should be provided. Where a recommendation is accepted, the appropriate learning team(s) should proceed to implementation.
The status of follow-up actions should be periodically review and updated in a tracking system and reported to senior managers with responsibility for their implementation.
Review
Improving the quality of your evaluation and critically reviewing the evaluation process and its outcomes against the evaluation’s initial objectives completes the evaluation process.
Evaluation review seeks to improve future evaluation practice for enhancing the value, influence and use of evaluation.
The objectives that you initially set for your evaluation were informed by what a good evaluation should do. The initial intention was to comply with the principles-based approach of the Commonwealth Evaluation Policy, and the APS Learning Evaluation Framework. The review of the evaluation processes and its outcomes can be made against those original objectives.
This desktop exercise should seek to:
- Describe how conducting the learning evaluation contributed to agency outcomes to enhance the value, influence and use of evaluation; and
- Generate lessons for future evaluations of learning initiatives through assessing what parts of the evaluation went well, what didn’t and the overall success of the evaluation.
Fact sheet 16 in the handbook provides a checklist to review the evaluation process and its outcomes.
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Contact the APS Academy
For further information and support, or to provide feedback on the Handbook, please visit the APS Academy's contact page.