Hi again. In the last video, we reviewed the main concepts of quality management and defining quality standards for a project. Then, after analyzing project documentation and a conversation between Peta and stakeholders, you helped solidify a list of quality standards for one of Sauce & Spoon's project deliverables. Once the quality management plan is underway with clearly-defined quality standards, you're ready to measure against your standards and can finally begin implementing the project. Since the last activity, Peta and her team have begun implementing the tablet rollout. Both of the restaurants that were selected for the pilot have had tables outfitted with tablets. The staff has been trained and guests have been placing their orders using the new tablets. In this video, we'll discuss the importance of evaluation as it relates to the project's quality management plan, specifically quality assurance. Remember, quality assurance consists of reviewing processes to evaluate whether or not your project is delivering an acceptable level of quality. And evaluation involves observing, measuring, and then comparing your findings to a set of agreed upon criteria. This could be your quality standards or the overall goals of your project. Coming up, you'll create evaluation questions as part of the QA process so that you can measure how well your project is meeting the established quality standards. Understanding how to create strong evaluation questions will give you the tools and skills you need to measure the success of your project throughout the project life cycle. Let's get started. In the same way that quality management plans may look different for each project, quality assurance could be implemented in a variety of ways. Some examples of quality assurance are beta testing, internal checklists, and feedback surveys. Each of these methods allow you to evaluate and measure how well your project is meeting its goals. Evaluation is a form of research designed to promote learning and inform decisions. It also provides accountability and helps you assess to what extent the project has achieved its objectives. When you use evaluation, you're able to improve upon, judge, and learn about different aspects of the project and the project itself. For example, with the Sauce & Spoon project, evaluation can help you improve how to implement the staff training process more efficiently. It might help you judge or assess whether something is working the way it was intended or whether you should continue in the same direction. It could be that the staff had a hard time learning how to use the tablets because the touch screens kept malfunctioning, in which case you'd need to assess whether or not to continue with the original launch date. You also need to make sure that the project is not creating any unintended problems, either for the organization, your team, or anyone else impacted by the projects existence. For example, you'll need to assess when the best time for tablet installation is. If you schedule tablet installation when the restaurant is open, that might create a negative dining experience for restaurant guests. By reflecting on areas of improvement and judging how certain aspects of the project performed, you learn what things made the project run is intended, how it can be replicated, and how challenges could be overcome in the future. Your evaluation may have a single focus, like identifying what needs to be improved or judging whether a project or process should continue in its current format. Regardless of your goals, your evaluation will ultimately allow you to assess all three of these areas of improvement and lead you to a better understanding of the overall success of the project, as well as its impact on and benefit to the organization. Okay, so now that we know why evaluation is used in project management, let's get into the evaluation process so that you know how to carry out an evaluation and get the information you need. In order to identify what you really want to know about your project, first articulate why you're evaluating. Understanding your "why" will shape the types of questions you ask about your project. This goes back to improving, judging, and learning. Even though all three of these will be addressed to some degree, certain aspects will have a more specific focus for evaluation. You can narrow down what to focus on by reviewing both the project goals and organizational goals and determining how the aspect you're evaluating connects to one of these goals. Let's discuss an example. The Sauce & Spoon project has just reached one of its last milestones—the completion of three key deliverables that are required for project launch testing. Those deliverables are: installing the tablets, integrating the tablets with the POS system, and training the staff to use the tablets. In an upcoming meeting with stakeholders, Peta will need to provide an update on the project's progress and share an evaluation of this milestone. It's important for Peta to share this evaluation since it will inform stakeholders on future phases of the project and beyond, including a tablet rollout at two more restaurant locations. So Peta's "why" is judging the quality and performance of the tablets and identifying ways to improve the training process. Once you've decided what your reasons for evaluating are, you're ready to write out your evaluation questions. An evaluation question is a key question about the outcomes, impact, and/or effectiveness of your project or program. There are two main categories of evaluation questions: questions that ask how you can make improvements and questions that help you measure and compare. Questions that help you improve sound like this: How can we improve? What is working and what's not working? Which goals are being met? Who is benefiting? What are the most common participant reactions? Next, we have questions that measure and compare. These questions will help you make judgments about how or whether to proceed with the process or with the project itself. Questions for measuring and comparing sound like this: What were the results? Were there unintended outcomes? What were the costs and benefits? Are there any lessons to be learned? Should we continue? So if we think back to the Sauce & Spoon project, one of the evaluation questions might be: To what extent do tablets improve the staff's work performance? If you keep in mind the overall goals of the project, you'll be able to write effective questions that generate the type of data you want. Effective evaluation questions meet the following criteria: They address stakeholder or user values, interests, and concerns; they relate to the purpose of the project and of evaluation, they're worth answering and are important for the project and beyond; and they're practical and feasible to answer with available resources. Amazing job! Let's review some of what we've learned so far. Evaluation is a form of research designed to promote learning and informed decisions. It also provides accountability. An evaluation question is a key question about the outcomes, impact, and/or effectiveness of your project or a key aspect of your project. And there are two main categories of evaluation questions—those that ask how to make improvements and those that help you measure and compare. In the next video, I'll discuss how to create evaluation indicators for your questions, which will help you focus the type of feedback that will be most useful to your project. You'll apply what you've learned in upcoming activities as you review the supporting materials and write your own set of evaluation questions and indicators. Meet you there.
