Dear Emilia, I come to give my contribution on the very important point: how to define and identify lessons learned? Indeed, lessons learned are defined as a reasonable approach that serves to discover mistakes and strengths during the process of implementing activities, with the aim of using them as a reference in order to appropriate by correcting, adapting and adopting the same activities for the achievement of the objectives. To achieve this, there is an identification process that I use during evaluations and project management:
1. Use of quarterly implementation fidelity assessments "FMO": This is a unit of measurement to assess the ToC designed on the basis of project effect, outcome, activities, outputs etc. whereby this assessment measures if the planned activities are able to achieve the outputs quarterly. Thus, the monthly MEAL report will be drafted in the form of a dashboard to demonstrate the quarterly progress of the implementation of activities.
2. Quarterly workshop organization: this activity is very important in which the overall result on weakness and strength will be shared with all departments (technical, logistics, grant, finance..) to identify the mistakes or strengths making the activities have effectively achieved the outputs or have not achieved the outputs as planned in order to draw an effective model.
3. Organise focus groups during the workshop: this last step brings together the managers of different departments to reflect on the weakness or strength, the real cause on which each department has contributed to the success or failure in order to to provide a solution, which will be taken as a lesson to launch the next quarter of activities. These steps are taken into account during the impact evaluation as well to ensure that all lessons are included in the report for the next project.
RE: How to define and identify lessons learned?
Hello everyone!
Dear Emilia, I come to give my contribution on the very important point: how to define and identify lessons learned? Indeed, lessons learned are defined as a reasonable approach that serves to discover mistakes and strengths during the process of implementing activities, with the aim of using them as a reference in order to appropriate by correcting, adapting and adopting the same activities for the achievement of the objectives. To achieve this, there is an identification process that I use during evaluations and project management:
1. Use of quarterly implementation fidelity assessments "FMO": This is a unit of measurement to assess the ToC designed on the basis of project effect, outcome, activities, outputs etc. whereby this assessment measures if the planned activities are able to achieve the outputs quarterly. Thus, the monthly MEAL report will be drafted in the form of a dashboard to demonstrate the quarterly progress of the implementation of activities.
2. Quarterly workshop organization: this activity is very important in which the overall result on weakness and strength will be shared with all departments (technical, logistics, grant, finance..) to identify the mistakes or strengths making the activities have effectively achieved the outputs or have not achieved the outputs as planned in order to draw an effective model.
3. Organise focus groups during the workshop: this last step brings together the managers of different departments to reflect on the weakness or strength, the real cause on which each department has contributed to the success or failure in order to to provide a solution, which will be taken as a lesson to launch the next quarter of activities.
These steps are taken into account during the impact evaluation as well to ensure that all lessons are included in the report for the next project.
[translated from French]