Expert insights: Karen McHugh on why strong M&E skills are crucial for project success

"Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) are two project management skills. As a project manager, you absolutely need to know how to put in place an effective project monitoring system, as well as how to commission and manage an evaluation that provides you with the information you need when you need it. These two management tools serve different but highly complementary purposes.

A well-designed monitoring system will allow you to track your project’s progress towards its planned results, flagging any potential obstacles or threats to your project in a timely manner so that you can intervene to get it back on track by making the necessary adjustments. It is a key project management tool.

On the other hand, even though Evaluation will draw on data delivered by your project monitoring system, it differs from monitoring in a number of key aspects.

Firstly, whilst monitoring is generally done by project staff, i.e., internally, evaluation is generally carried out by persons (experts) who are external to the project.

Secondly, while monitoring is carried out throughout the lifecycle of a project, i.e., it is continuous, evaluation takes place at a given moment in time in the project, e.g., halfway through (mid-term evaluation), at the end of the project (final evaluation), or sometime after the project has ended (ex post evaluation).

And thirdly, while monitoring focuses on more operational aspects of a project and is mainly focused on tracking progress towards planned results, as well as risk management, evaluation provides a deeper analysis, generally structured around an assessment of the so-called OECD DAC criteria: relevance, coherence, effectiveness, efficiency, impact, and sustainability.

Ultimately, the goal of M&E is to lead to the improved performance of your project through better-informed decision-making, as well as the improved design of future projects, by allowing you to feed the lessons learned from this project into the next project cycle. It also serves a key accountability function, providing evidence to donors and other stakeholders on how resources were used and to what extent your project delivered as planned." - Karen McHugh, trainer of the Monitoring & Evaluation (M&E) Executive Education course organised at the College of Europe in Bruges. 

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