Embedding M&E at LSHTM

Every year, LSHTM hosts a week of activities to encourage staff and research students to share ideas and strengthen skills. Emily Balls, SHARE's Monitoring and Evaluation Officer, ran a workshop at the week. Here, she summarises and reflects on what was discussed.

This LSHTM week, I organised a workshop on using project monitoring data to improve project delivery and implementation. I gave a presentation on how SHARE uses monitoring data for improvements, and we then broke into different groups where staff could share their own experiences.

Project monitoring at LSHTM

Workshop participants shared their thoughts on current M&E processes within their projects. These which were often informal and driven by donor requirements. They discussed what was needed for better project management, noting the importance of setting monitoring indicators at the beginning of a project and negotiating with donors from the start.

What were the challenges?

There was some lively discussion about the different challenges that staff experience around project monitoring! These included:

• Accessing and engaging with project participants in communities
• Balancing adaptive management with the need for evaluation fidelity
• Making time for reflection and learning on busy projects
• Clarifying monitoring roles and responsibilities.

Improving monitoring data

In the workshop, we found that staff currently use a wide range of tools for monitoring from interviews to surveys to document reviews. We also discussed the challenges of verifying data from self-assessment and self-reports by project implementers – this can be subject to bias or vary in quality. Academic colleagues in the room shared their experience of using observations for research – this approach could be transferable to project monitoring to help improve quality and better verify results.

Where project monitoring and process evaluation meet

We also discussed the difference between project monitoring and process evaluation, noting that the lines can be blurred depending on the objectives for M&E. One strength of project monitoring is that it can be an iterative process which seeks to continually improve projects, however this isn’t always easy to apply on academic projects which may have strict parameters. 

Learning from each other

It was interesting to learn about the variety of different approaches taken within LSHTM and to identify new opportunities for sharing ideas and good practice. A common challenge was a lack of clarity around resource implications for project monitoring – the group agreed the importance of building time and budget for this into project proposals.

We also realised we could create more opportunities to share learning across projects within LSHTM and think about guidance for improving monitoring across research projects. I’m looking forward to following up on these discussions with colleagues around LSHTM!