Project and strategy M&E

M&E and project management measure overlapping things and rarely talk to each other. Project management asks whether the work is on schedule and within budget; M&E asks whether the work is producing the change it promised. A programme can be perfectly on schedule and achieving nothing, and only one of these functions will notice.

The same disconnection appears one level up, between organisational strategy and the measurement attached to it. Balanced scorecards, strategy maps, OKRs and KPI cascades are all attempts to make a strategy measurable; each has a characteristic way of failing, usually by proliferating indicators until nobody can say which ones matter. These pages cover both interfaces and the review points where they are supposed to meet.