Evaluation Plan Cheat Sheets: Using Evaluation Plan Summaries to Assist with Project Management

We are Kelly Robertson and Lyssa Wilson Becho, and we work on EvaluATE as well as several other projects at The Evaluation Center at Western Michigan University. We wanted to share a trick that has helped us keep track of our evaluation activities and better communicate the details of an evaluation plan with our clients. To do this, we take the most important information from an evaluation plan and create a summary that can serve as a quick-reference guide for the evaluation management process. We call these “evaluation plan cheat sheets.”

The content of each cheat sheet is determined by the information needs of the evaluation team and clients. Cheat sheets can serve the needs of the evaluation team (for example, providing quick reminders of delivery dates) or of the client (for example, giving a reminder of when data collection activities occur). Examples of items we like to include on our cheat sheets are shown in Figures 1-3 and include the following:

• A summary of deliverables noting which evaluation questions each deliverable will answer. In the table at the top of Figure 1, we indicate which report will answer which evaluation question. Letting our clients know which questions are addressed in each deliverable helps to set their expectations for reporting. This is particularly useful for evaluations that require multiple types of deliverables.
• A timeline of key data collection activities and report draft due dates. On the bottom of Figure 1, we visualize a timeline with simple icons and labels. This allows the user to easily scan the entirety of the evaluation plan. We recommend including important dates for deliverables and data collection. This helps both the evaluation team and the client stay on schedule.
• A data collection matrix. This is especially useful for evaluations with a lot of data collection sources. The example shown in Figure 2 identifies who implements the instrument, when the instrument will be implemented, the purpose of the instrument, and the data source. It is helpful to identify who is responsible for data collection activities in the cheat sheet, so nothing gets missed. If the client is responsible for collecting much of the data in the evaluation plan, we include a visual breakdown of when data should be collected (shown at the bottom of Figure 2).
• A progress table for evaluation deliverables. Despite the availability of project management software with fancy Gantt charts, sometimes we like to go back to basics. We reference a simple table, like the one in Figure 3, during our evaluation team meetings to provide an overview of the evaluation’s status and avoid getting bogged down in the details.

Importantly, include the client and evaluator contact information in the cheat sheet for quick reference (see Figure 1). We also find it useful to include a page footer with a “modified on” date that automatically updates when the document is saved. That way, if we need to update the plan, we can be sure we are working on the most recent version.