Evaluate

The last phase of a KM programme is that of evaluation. This involves assessment of results against your plans and a set of measures. Many of the approaches simply involve revisiting your initial assessments (the 'before') and updating them (the 'after').

An important aspect is timing. Evaluation is not something simply to be done once at the end of a 2-3 year KM programme. You should also review each project or project stage soon after its completion. You may also do more significant evaluations at key milestones, and in any case annually, typically as part of an annual review of your KM Strategy and as preparatory work for its update and your next annual budgeting round.

In this section we give an overview of some useful evaluation approaches:

• AAR (After Action Review) - a project or project milestone review process
• From Baseline to Benchmarking - assessing your overall KM progress against your initial baseline
• Benefits Realisation - evaluating if your achieved the benefits anticipated
• Intellectual Capital Measures - for those who want to take measurement to a new strategic level.

But it does not end there. You need constantly to learn from your evaluations and use it to feedback improvements into early parts of the KM lifecycle. Therefore we give an overview of:

• The Learning Organization - what you need to have in place to learn from your evaluation
• From Benchmarking to Benchlearning - a structured approach to encourage an attitude of continuous learning from good examples.

Last updated: 19th March 2011