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/ Canadian Government Executive
// March 2016
Program Evaluation
Improving the Utilization of
Evaluation Reports by Focusing
on Clients’ Needs
Marie-Josée
Courchesne
Linda
Vertefeuille
I
t is no secret that evaluation reports
in the federal public service are not
being utilized to the extent that they
should to support decision-making.
This can be explained in part by the re-
quirements of the 2009 Policy on Evalua-
tion, which stipulates that all direct pro-
gram spending must be evaluated every
five years. The very fact that each pro-
gram must be evaluated in that five-year
span might not coincide with the actual
needs of senior management. With the
Policy currently being revised, there may
be more flexibility to undertake more
strategic evaluations. Evaluations that
are better aligned with management’s
needs will not only serve as a useful tool
to support decision-making, but they will
also help address any concerns, priorities,
or challenges that senior management
might have.
Evaluators gain a great deal by choos-
ing evaluation projects that are highly
significant to their Department, notably
by factoring in departmental and senior
management priorities. To accomplish this
task, evaluators must ask themselves first
“what keeps senior managers up at night?”
Infrastructure Canada:
Using the Audit Process for
Evaluation Planning
The Evaluation Division at Infrastructure
Canada recently adopted an innovative
approach, similar to planning approaches
used in some other departments and agen-
cies, to improve its planning process. In-
stead of relying only on a more traditional
planning approach based on the develop-
ment of a program inventory, our evalua-
tion team embarked upon a special jour-
ney with the audit team, by participating
in a joint four-phased risk-based process.
What we were hoping to gain out of this
unprecedented collaboration was a better
plan that would be more useful to manage-
ment and would help mitigate what keeps
them up at night.