Implementing your project
Monitoring: overview
Whether your project will last for a day or many months, you need to make sure that it is meeting its objectives and working well for participants. This means that you need to check on progress, on the management of any known risks and on any emerging concerns.
In shorter projects, the monitoring process may rely largely on relatively informal communication. Project team members should regularly communicate with each other, feeding in their own observations and any insights from participants. By having 'feedback' sessions built in to the programme, participants can also comment directly on the process or other aspects of the event, and this can provide useful information to the event organisers.
In longer and more complex projects, you probably need a number of formal and informal mechanisms for effective monitoring. Formal monitoring involves regular and thorough checking and documenting of progress against objectives and the action plan, and of risks against the 'risk register'.
When monitoring progress, it is very important to gather information that is meaningful, and not to get confused between activities/ products and outcomes. You need to monitor progress to ensure that the plan/strategy remains suitable, and to provide information for evaluation purposes. What you want to measure are the impacts of your project, such as improved levels of public reassurance, not, for example, the number of leaflets distributed (which may, despite their intended purpose, have had little or no impact on public perceptions of crime levels).
Monitoring progress can also help you more easily to identify risks. For example, if you have set up a web survey for young people to complete by a certain date, regular monitoring of the number of hits will let you know whether you are likely to meet your target. If there are very few responses, you will then have time to plan more awareness-raising activities, or give young people the option to comment in other ways, such as via text or in 'letterboxes' posted at schools etc.
For more information on risk management, see the Embedding engagement section. It talks about identifying what the risks are and how likely they are to happen. Then plans need to be put in place to minimise or eradicate those risks. Monitoring risks involves re-doing the same process that you underwent to develop the risk register. It is necessary because: new risks may emerge; previously identified risks may be more or less likely to happen than originally thought; strategies for managing risks may have proved ineffective.
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