Why Monitoring & Evaluation is Important in Business

Being in business gets you thinking of ways to achieve more success. In your improvement journey, you must have come across monitoring and evaluation.

Wondering how M&E can be helpful to your business? Well, that is what we are here to discuss, but first, let us look at its definition.

What Do Monitoring and Evaluation Mean?

M&E is a combination of collection, analysis, and assessment of data to what extent a project has or has not met its objectives.

These two processes are aimed at improving a project’s efficiency and effectiveness. By focusing on the set targets and planned activities, monitoring and evaluation help keep work on track and help identify problems.

What do Monitoring and Evaluation Have in Common?

Monitoring and evaluation are two different processes but are both geared to make you learn from how you are doing things and what you are doing.

To achieve this, both processes focus on:

• Effectiveness impact – helps you quantify the necessary amount of input concerning the output expected.
• Efficiency – Measure to what extent a project has achieved the goals it aimed to attain.

Monitoring involves:

• Forming the indicators that will determine how efficient, effective and impactful your project will be.
• Creating methods and means of collecting information relating to the set indicators.
• Data collection and recording.
• Analysis of the collected data.
• Implementing the analyzed information in the day-to-day management of your business.

Evaluation involves:

• Examining the goals you intended for your business to achieve by looking at the difference you wanted to make.
• Assessment of your business’ progress towards achieving the goals you want to attain.
• Checking your business’ strategies and how effective it was in following them. It will also involve examining whether the set strategies worked, and if not, why?

So, why do you need monitoring and evaluation in business?

Importance of Monitoring and Evaluation in Business

Using monitoring and evaluation tools in your business will help you see how your projects are doing against the objectives you put in place.

M&E will tell you if your projects are having an impact, whether they are working efficiently, and will also help you learn how to do better next time.

How do these processes help you do all this?

The results you get from conducting monitoring and evaluation on your business’ projects will tell you the following:

• Problems your project has encountered and their causes
• Suggestions to the problems your project is facing
• The questions about the assumptions of your project and its strategy
• Where you need to reflect on as far as the direction you want your business to take and how to get there.
• Information and insight beneficial to your business
• How to act on the information and insight the processes will provide you.

Once you have all this information at your disposal, the likelihood that your business will make a positive development difference increases!

In general,

Monitoring and evaluation’s main focus is to keep a project in check to ensure it attains its highest potential. Your business will benefit a whole lot from M&E, don’t you think?

If you agree, sign up for this monitoring and evaluation training to help you achieve business success.