Reporting, use and communication

An evaluation that is not used has failed, whatever its methodological quality — and non-use is the normal outcome, not the exceptional one. The causes are rarely mysterious: the report arrived after the decision, it answered a question nobody asked, it buried the finding on page forty, or no one was ever made responsible for acting on it.

This section deals with the last mile. How a report is structured so its findings are findable. How results are shown without the chart doing the arguing. And the management response — the formal mechanism by which recommendations are accepted, rejected with reasons, assigned to someone and tracked, which is the single strongest predictor of whether an evaluation changes anything.