Programme Issues

Project reporting mechanisms

Projects rarely used their blogs as a means of publishing lessons learnt as they progressed through their work. There are questions around the effectiveness of current reporting mechanisms to capture important information from projects. This is illustrated by the fact that interim reports delivered at the end of April 2012 hardly mentioned senior management engagement at all. On being requested to include this in our report to the Senior Advisory Committee meeting we had to go out to projects and specifically ask for information about their senior management engagement. We asked them specific questions:

• How engaged your senior managers are with OER?

• What are you doing to engage them?

• Whether it seems to be working?

We received back some very interesting responses which resulted in the development of a wikipage on senior management engagement (this has since been augmented by information in final reports.) However this served to highlight that we would have missed this if we hadn't specifically asked for the information.

This may have been obtained if projects had been asked to report using the Synthesis and Evaluation framework or Evaluation Toolkit - as this is a specific question in that framework. This is discussed further in the next section...

Evaluation Toolkit and Framework

The Synthesis and Evaluation Team spent considerable time developing a toolkit to help projects engage with the Synthesis and Evaluation Framework

Short Timescale and programme timings