Reviewing and adjusting interventions and strategy
Information generated by monitoring and measuring should be used to review intervention progress: are results being realised as envisaged? These internal reviews and the process of data triangulation are the essence of integrating MRM systems into programme decision-making. Intervention results chains and indicators should be updated to reflect any alterations.
Use monitoring data to assess your progress against the indicators in your Systemic Change Framework. Discuss whether partnerships should continue, be adjusted or exited altogether, based on the levels of partner contribution, motivation and ownership.
Establish processes and procedures that encourage staff, including managers, to use information to review the programme’s performance regularly. A combination of formal and informal processes and procedures are needed:
- Formal processes and procedures: regular progress review and data triangulation meetings should be scheduled, ideally monthly and quarterly. These are interactive meetings involving all technical staff. They require key documents to be up-to-date and shared with peers beforehand as inputs. On a quarterly basis you should review progress against the up-to-date version of the intervention results chain: is the intervention working? Have key activities resulted in changes to how players within the market system work? What else needs to change? Do assumptions still hold? On a monthly basis you should review the status of specific partnerships: is the partnership working? Is this partner the right ‘vehicle’ for achieving system-level change? It is useful to use some simple ‘early warning’ checks when reviewing partnerships: what is the likelihood that your partner will continue to fully adopt the changes they are experimenting with? Are incentives to all parties clear? Are the changes initiated by your partner having an effect on your target group and is it the desired effect?
- Informal processes and procedures: staff in market systems development programmes tend to have considerable autonomy. Important tacit knowledge can be lost because staff lack the means to capture and share the information they amass when in the field, on the phone with partners, or in discussions with informed third parties. Help staff to maintain simple records or ‘learning narratives’ to capture this tacit knowledge. This isn’t a reporting obligation, merely the documenting of staff knowledge as and when it expands.
These records constitute an important part of the programme’s memory. They provide the raw material for formal meetings. They help capture vital qualitative information, give you insights into what else is going on in the system beyond your interventions, and identify issues that need to be followed up.