World Bank Group M&E Professionals Come Together to Build Virtual Community, Share Knowledge

Skills matter. And for evaluators who are in the position of determining what works and what doesn't, and who have the responsibility to help guide the institutions we work for toward practices that will yield the best results, professional competency is a must. 

Yet, the evaluation family has struggled for years now with the challenge of establishing a broadly agreed upon professional profile for evaluation practitioners.  And that's not surprising. Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) professionals come from all sorts of educational backgrounds - €”economics, education, psychology, sociology, and so on. This interdisciplinary mix ensures a valuable richness of experience, but it is equally important to build on that strength to ensure certain standards are met and maintained. In that regard, M&E professionals need to be adequately and appropriately trained in relevant techniques and methods, and in the exercise of sound judgment based on available, objectively verifiable evidence.   

In the World Bank Group, we believe this to be an important agenda for our own staff working on results measurement.  In June 2014 you might have read about the World Bank Group setting up a "Results Measurement and Evidence Stream"€ (RMES), which is really a community of practice for M&E professionals across the organization. From the outset, RMES had several goals: to nurture and promote talent, knowledge, innovation, standards, and operational solutions among a cadre of World Bank Group staff specializing in M&E, including staff from the Independent Evaluation Group. By design, the group enjoys a rich and diverse membership who, unlike in the past where they worked in relative isolation, can now share experiences and knowledge across a range of relevant areas, including: independent evaluation; performance and portfolio monitoring; and M&E advisory services on project designs.

Beyond a virtual community, we found, perhaps not surprisingly, huge value in occasional face-to-face meetings, and, the more we designed them for this specific purpose, we also saw real knowledge exchange and the development of personal networks. We saw this particularly in the context of a two-day gathering RMES Together 2015 - that was originally meant to "€œjust"€ foster learning, but then evolved to make a major dent in the challenge of building a community, establishing links between people beyond the common professional set of interests. 

RMES Together 2015 comprised over 40 small group sessions that were delivered in a highly interactive manner with community building and learning as a focus.  Sessions were peer-led, with topics that were specific to results measurement and evaluation professionals. They were designed around a range of modalities including: sharing trade secrets and "how to"€ knowledge; showcasing tools, techniques, and lessons that can be adapted for M&E work; facilitated brainstorming, master classes, peer-to-peer clinics, and a fast-paced interview-style plenary. Themes included how to improve projects through early stage and quality M&E advice, influencing senior management in decision-making, and improving the quality of evidence. 

For those of us who have worked in M&E for years, we know that the M&E profession is changing - and for the better.  A common complaint among M&E professionals in large and small organizations has been that our work is often not given adequate priority within organizational policy and operations. That was also the sentiment expressed during the RMES event, where some of the biggest challenges the community identified included getting more senior management attention on results work.

That message seems to be resonating with Bank Group leadership and we are seeing a shift, with renewed emphasis, on achieving outcomes rather than focusing on inputs and outputs, along with a stronger imperative for evidence-based decision-making. 

Initial feedback on RMES Together 2015 is very positive and we intend to build on it to keep the momentum going. We'd love to hear about your experiences. What approaches to professionalization and competency development have you tried at your organizations? What has worked and what has not? 

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Submitted by Tessie Catsambas on Fri, 03/20/2015 - 02:53

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Dear Maurya and Monika, What an interesting approach to promoting learning and increasing the Bank's own organizational capacity. It almost seems like you created a mini-university, replicating the model of the American Evaluation Association where so much excellent peer-managed learning happens. And, you have done something more: as an intact group, you can involve your own managers in the process and engage them in evaluative conversations. Well done! An important asset of IEG is its strong participatory facilitation of learning capacity that reflected in the blog post. The more I work in evaluation, the more I appreciate the need for facilitating participatory methods. I particularly liked the "sharing trade secrets" idea. As you might know, in 2015, Wiley will publish a new New Directions Journal in Evaluation volume on The Role of Facilitation in Evaluation--editors Rietta Fierro, Dawn Smart, and Alissa Schwartz. My chapter focuses on the role of facilitation competencies in evaluation (also presented at EES 2015 in Dublin). Thank you for a blog that illustrates the close link between evaluation, learning, performance, and evaluation use.

Submitted by Maurya West Meiers on Sun, 03/22/2015 - 21:34

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Tessie, thanks very much for your comments about our recent work! In fact, this was done not only by IEG teams, but jointly with other M&E groups and professionals across the World Bank Group. You will probably not be surprised to hear that we found the “joint ownership” and peer-led approach to have been a key to the success of the effort. Peer-led planning and delivery of sessions has, as you noted, many commonalities with the American Evaluation Association’s (AEA) conference: Our community members developed sessions that were highly relevant and customized to their M&E work along all stages of the project/program cycles. You’ll see that with some examples of session titles: “So how DO we link project results to ‘higher-level results’ (and survive attribution)? Brainstorm and share your ideas using ‘job creation and inclusive growth’ as a case,” “Debunking the mysteries of the Implementation and Completion Report – Producing better quality products,” and “The insider’s guide to assessing country programs.” We did something in addition, though, that cannot be done so easily in other settings, such as at the AEA conference. Since we had an in-tact and internal group, we provided a high degree of session team preparation support. For instance, we had presenters participate in both storytelling workshops and coaching sessions – all in an effort to allow participants to contextualize knowledge as it was shared, and to develop a personal dimension. This is what happens when sessions are engaging and not “talking down to” sessions. We also benefited from building on a similar internal learning and community event that Monika Weber-Fahr spearheaded a year ago in another sectoral area in the World Bank Group, where the learning modalities (such as “sharing trade secrets” -see https://ieg.worldbankgroup.org/Data/rmes_modalities.pdf ) were initiated. Our experiences in this event tie very nicely into the work that you and others are doing to promote the facilitation of learning capacity – an important and growing area for M&E professionals. Indeed, we look forward to seeing the forthcoming New Directions volume that you mentioned and look forward to seeing you at AEA to learn more!

Submitted by Tessie Catsambas on Mon, 03/23/2015 - 01:16

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Dear Maurya, Your response raises a question for me: how did you succeed in gaining agreement from colleagues to devote time and participate in this activity? Your lessons around how you "sold"and rolled this out internally would be very useful for all of us, especially those in large organizations who champion evaluation internally.

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