Beyond the tools

Beyond the Tools Introduction

We started our journey into evidence collection considering where you want your peer program to be. This has involved a series of steps and decisions unique to each peer organisation. The four perspectives of the Balanced Scorecard (BSC), which structured our program objectives, guided these. We then thought about what we would assess and how we would assess them. The whole purpose is to ensure we can gather the evidence we need for the ongoing success of each customised program.

We have explored a vast array of options available for selecting measures to use as well as the techniques used to perform the assessment. In addition to gaining an understanding of the various types of tools and method of information collection, we also contemplated some of the basics involved in developing relevant and tailored tools. Hopefully you now feel a greater confidence about gathering evidence and have a reasonable understanding of the ways we can harvest the information we want.

In this section of the training package we move beyond these tools and the specifics of gathering evidence and delve into how we can utilise the information we have accumulated. We will focus on simple information presentation techniques. Naturally, the nature of information we pull together will determine the way we draw upon it. I am sure it pleases many of you that this is not a statistics course. Therefore, even if you have a large pool of quantitative data, we will limit our coverage to simple presentation methods, including Excel spreadsheets, for analysing it and applying your valuable evidence. This is because very few peer organisations will have access to statistical software or data analysis expertise.