aes16

Joanne Sheffield (New Zealand Defence Force)

This presentation explores the environmental and cultural conditions required to drive successful evaluation capacity building within a NZ military organisation. It shares the principles used to establish realistic organisational readiness measures to inform the development of ECB initiatives, with the ultimate aim of increasing evaluation use at all levels across the organisation. 

The paper uses ECB and organisational culture research as its foundation, to develop a strategy to align ECB initiatives to current organisational readiness. It examines the importance of continuous monitoring and performance measurement, to enable emergent requirements and real-time organisational needs to be met, thus informing achievable ECB initiatives. It argues that the organisational positioning of an internal evaluation function is critical, particularly with regard to maintaining visibility and establishing credibility across larger organisations, with the intent of encouraging greater evaluation utilisation.

A central theme of ECB theory is that it must develop an organisation's ability to do and use evaluation. This paper discusses the scoping exercise undertaken by the Performance and Evaluation Unit of New Zealand Defence College, firstly to measure current organisational readiness, but more importantly, to align those results with the development of suitable tools and ECB initiatives to firmly embed evaluation use within a complex and diverse organisational landscape.

Because of NZDF's environmental, political, cultural and organisational diversity, the evaluation landscape in which we work requires the capacity to respond to change and remain future-focussed. This presentation explores the practical implications and applications for ECB and has potential to translate to other organisations just starting out on their own ECB journeys.