Monitoring and Evaluation

If you don’t care about how well you are doing or about what impact you are having, why
bother to do it at all?  Monitoring and evaluation enable you to assess the quality and impact
of your work, against your action plans and your strategic plan.  In order for monitoring and
evaluation to be really valuable, you do need to have planned well. Planning is dealt with in
detail in other toolkits on this website.

What you need for setup your monitoring and evaluation
1.System for Data Collection
2.Data Analysis
3.results

Data View

Data Views 

Is your IT department feeling a little under the weather? Send it to the IT Infirmity! The What’s Ailing Your IT Department infographic from ViaWest is their first infographic!

What do CIOs rank as their biggest IT aches and pains? What are the average salaries of employees within IT departments? What is the impact of ITtention Deficit - the inability to focus on your core business?  Find out in this infographic from ViaWest.

I really like this design, but the data visualizations need help.  It’s obviously a promotional piece for ViaWest, but there’s nothing wrong with using an infographic that way.  They have also made a high-resolution PDF available.

The story reads very easily from top-to-bottom with clearly separated sections. The icons for each sections are also amusing and keep the overall tone light-hearted.

The only issues I have with the design are the data visualizations. 

• Don’t put 51% on top of a bunch of people icons, and not highlight 51% of the icons to go along with the numerical value. 
• The two bars showing the data created before and after 2009 are actually two parts of the whole 100%, so this should be shown as a stacked bar.  Why is this shown as two separate bars?
• Both of the office tower icon visuals in ITrauma would be easier to understand if they were a single row of building icons.  The 93% is hard to understand visually since you can’t visually tell that 13% of the last building is shaded.  In fact, it doesn’t look to me like the last building is shaded properly.
• At the bottom, there should be a copyright statement
• The design should also include the URL to find the original, high-resolution image on the ViaWest site so when people see this infographic shared on other sites, they can find the original.

Thanks to Todd for sending in the link!

The Defense of the Ancients (DotA) infographic from GameArena.com takes game enthusiasts through a brief history of how the game came about!

Dota, Defence of the Ancients, is the latest hype in gaming. Initially developed as a modified game in Starcraft, the concept has now grown globally and has even made its way into professional competitions. Popular game titles that have implemented the “DotA” concept include Warcraft 3, DotA Allstars, DemiGod, League of Legends, Heroes of Newerth and Realm of the Titans. Two more upcoming titles that will certainly get the gaming world’s attention are DotA 2 and Blizzard DotA.

So what is DotA exactly? Our trusty graphics boffins have once again created the infographic below for the complete history on how the new genre came about.

The design style is certainly relevant to the game look-and-feel itself.  The timeline is odd that some events don’t have specific dates identified.  The use if icon illustrations for different concepts and company/game logos on the timeline helps the reader.  I would have liked to see some of the stats behind the game and its popularity.

Thanks to Eric for sending in the link!

Must Read it If you are not getting interview call

Although we may never know why we didn't get chosen for a job interview, a recent study is shedding some light on recruiters' decision-making behavior. According to TheLadders research, recruiters spend an average of "six seconds before they make the initial 'fit or no fit' decision" on candidates. 

The study used a scientific technique called “eye tracking” on 30 professional recruiters and examined their eye movements during a 10-week period to "record and analyze where and how long someone focuses when digesting a piece of information or completing a task."

In the short time that they spend with your resume, the study showed recruiters will look at your name, current title and company, current position start and end dates, previous title and company, previous position start and end dates, and education.

The two resumes below include a heat map of recruiters' eye movements. The one on the right was looked at more thoroughly than the one of the left because of its clear and concise format:

With such critical time constraints, you should make it easier for recruiters to find pertinent information by creating a resume with a clear visual hierarchy and don't include distracting visuals since "such visual elements reduced recruiters’ analytical capability and hampered decision-making" and kept them from "locating the most relevant information, like skills and experience."