Project Monitoring: Key Elements

• Project monitoring involves collecting and managing specific information or events related to a project's operation.
• It assists project/program management in assessing project status and provides funding agencies with a tool for performance evaluation.
• Project monitoring helps detect deviations for timely adjustments.
• It includes continuous or periodic review and surveillance by management to ensure that input deliveries, work schedules, and targeted outputs proceed according to plan.
• Project monitoring is the continuous assessment of project implementation in relation to the agreed schedule, use of inputs, infrastructure, and services by project beneficiaries.

Key Elements

• Measuring physical progress against the project plan.
• Measuring financial progress against projected cash flows and budget.
• Identifying problems to enable corrective and contingent actions.
• Conducting comparative analyses of financial costs and physical implementation for similar projects.

Monitoring & Project Development Cycle

• Linking monitoring to all phases of a project development cycle to realize optimum benefits.

Monitoring the Planning Phase

• Planning involves determining actions to achieve predetermined objectives.
• Considerations include the project's relevance to national needs, economic desirability, complementarities, utilization of potential capacity, and commitment to ongoing projects.
• Plans from the rural area should align with regional and national plans.

Monitoring the Implementation Phase

• Involves extensive physical preparations and execution of agency tasks, functions, and commitments.
• Ensures consistency of plans in a laddered pattern.

Monitoring the Programming Phase

• Activities cannot always be conducted simultaneously due to constraints like preparation, economic desirability, and legal restrictions.
• Effectiveness depends on timely problem identification and solving.

Monitoring and Reappraisal/Evaluation Phase

• Reappraisal validates original decisions and provides learning for future activities.
• Evaluation measures implementation progress toward goals.
• Both play a vital role in providing necessary inputs to planning and implementation processes.
• This can improve the quality of performances

Monitoring Methods and Tools

• Surveys using monitoring forms
• Field visits using checklists
• Periodic reporting
• Office meetings, with minutes recorded

Documentation

• A tool that aims to provide systematic and timely data on field-level project implementation activities.
• It fills the gap in the feedback system left by monitoring and evaluation.
• Documentation explains how the projects creates effects and impacts on target beneficiaries.
• It records the process or steps followed to produce effects and impacts.
• This reduces trial and error.
• It records experiences and lessons learned by implementers and managers.

Uses

• Must contain the record of progress and content of the program/project.

Considerations/Guidelines

• Proceedings should be concise and direct.
• Only salient points should be noted.
• Key decision points should be recorded.
• Issues requiring management attention should follow the actual sequence of activities.
• An executive summary, a one-page report, should be included.
• Photos, video tapes, and other visual aids can be provided as supporting documents.

Take Note!

• Guidelines focus on what activity is, who the performers are, when it occurs, the purpose, the field-level implementation process, and content.

What to document?

• Conducting participatory baseline survey
• Community-based communication planning
• Participatory planning
• Participatory training
• Participatory communication campaign
• Organizing community association
• Mobilizing village groups
• Monitoring project inputs, activities, and outputs.
• Evaluating project effects and impacts.
• Also include the decision-making and farming activities; the operation and management of cooperatives; the Maranao’s culture and living condition in Mindanao; and the growth and development of university.

Types of Documentation Activities

• Direct Observation: Involves observing activities, processes, or situations, useful in livelihood/demos projects.
• Participant Observation: Observing human interaction in a natural setting, requiring immersion in the community to gain people's confidence.

• Interviews: Establish a friendly relationship with the interviewee, avoid leading questions, and review the checklist of questions.
• Focus Group Discussion: Utilizes key informants through group discussions, sharing experiences, sentiments, problems, and aspirations.

• Video documentation offers a fast, direct, and accurate approach to getting information and recording the steps used in conducting new activities to develop manuals in expanding the pilot project’s area of coverage..
• Photo Documentation: Visual recording of the process or steps to follow.