10. Is the evaluation plan internally coherent and of high quality?

Once the evaluation plan is drafted, it is useful to review it to ensure it is internally coherent and is likely to lead to a high quality evaluation.  A set of quality standards have been developed for program evaluation studies which are also appropriate for project evaluation.  The standards were developed by a committee of leading evaluators in the 1990s in the US and have stood the test of considerable research and review since then.  These standards are available in a monograph but are also summarised online at:  The Program Evaluation Standards: http://www.wmich.edu/evalctr/jc/.  This site and the standards monograph have a wealth of useful information on how the standards might be applied in actual evaluation situations.

The Project Evaluation toolkit (http://www.utas.edu.au) from the Centre for the Advancement of Teaching and Learning at the University of Tasmania identifies a useful list of indicators for successful evaluation planning:

• key questions for investigation
• a set of evaluation criteria
• the involvement of major stakeholders in the enterprise
• a variety of data gathering and analysis tools to be used
• the confidence that evaluation results will be of use, and will be used, by those that need them.