Outcome Mapping: Building learning and reflection into development programs

Are you a grant maker, manager or evaluator who must assess your work to improve as well as be accountable for the use of resources and results? Does the project, program or organization you fund, manage or evaluate contend with substantial uncertainty about what to do and what will be the results? Do you thus experience constant change and unexpected and unforeseeable actors and factors in your intervention? Do you need to know what you are achieving and how in real time? And therefore, do you seek an alternative to conventional monitoring and evaluation of social change results? If yes, then you are the audience for this book. Beginning in 2002, working closely with co-evaluators and commissioners of evaluations, the author developed Outcome Harvesting to enable evaluators, grant makers, and managers to identify, formulate, verify, and make sense of changes that interventions have influenced in a broad range of cutting–edge innovation and development projects and programs around the world. Over these years, he led Outcome Harvesting evaluative exercises involving almost 500 non-governmental organizations, networks, government agencies, funding agencies, community-based organizations, research institutes and university programs. In over fifty evaluations, with forty co-evaluators he has harvested thousands of outcomes on six continents. Outcome Harvesting has proven useful in evaluations of a great diversity of initiatives: human rights advocacy, political, economic and environmental advocacy, arts and culture, health systems, information and communication technology, conflict and peace, water and sanitation, taxonomy for development, violence against women, rural development, organic agriculture, participatory democracy, waste management, public sector reform, good governance, eLearning, social accountability, and business competition, amongst others. In this book, the author explains the steps of Outcome Harvesting and how to customize them according to the nine underlying principles. He shares his experience and gives practical advice on how to work with Outcome Harvesting and remain true to its essential features.

In educational institutions, outcome-based education (OBE) remains crucial in measuring how certain teaching techniques are impacting the students’ ability to learn. Currently, these changes in students are mapped by analyzing the objectives and outcomes of certain learning processes. International accreditation agencies and quality assessment networks are all focusing on mapping between outcomes and objectives. The need of assessment tools arises that can provide a genuine mapping in the global context so that students or learners can achieve expected objectives. Assessment Tools for Mapping Learning Outcomes With Learning Objectives is a pivotal reference source that provides vital research on the implementation of quality assessment methods for measuring the outcomes of select learning processes on students. While highlighting topics such as quality assessment, effective employability, and student learning objectives, this book is ideally designed for students, administrators, policymakers, researchers, academicians, practitioners, managers, executives, strategists, and educators seeking current research on the application of modern mapping tools for assessing student learning outcomes in higher education.

"A project has to have a goal, otherwise, how do you know you're done? In the old days of engineering, setting project goals wasn't that hard. But when you're making software products, done is less obvious. When is Microsoft Word done? When is Google done? Or Facebook? In reality, software systems are never done. So then how do we give teams a goal that they can work on? Mostly, we simply ask teams to build features-but features are the wrong way to go. We often build features that create no value. Instead, we need to give teams an outcome to achieve. Setting goals as outcomes sounds simple, but it can be hard to do in practice. This book is a practical guide to using outcomes to guide the work of your team"--Publisher's website.

User story mapping is a valuable tool for software development, once you understand why and how to use it. This insightful book examines how this often misunderstood technique can help your team stay focused on users and their needs without getting lost in the enthusiasm for individual product features. Author Jeff Patton shows you how changeable story maps enable your team to hold better conversations about the project throughout the development process. Your team will learn to come away with a shared understanding of what you’re attempting to build and why. Get a high-level view of story mapping, with an exercise to learn key concepts quickly Understand how stories really work, and how they come to life in Agile and Lean projects Dive into a story’s lifecycle, starting with opportunities and moving deeper into discovery Prepare your stories, pay attention while they’re built, and learn from those you convert to working software

A practical guide to impact mapping, a simple yet incredibly effective method for collaborative strategic planning that helps organizations make an impact with software.