December finds us back in Canada for a family Christmas – the full complement of three children, spouses and three grandchildren! This time in New Brunswick where our daughter has family and has moved back to from their last posting in Quebec Province. From 30+degrees C in Toowoomba to -1 today and a nice covering of snow. The picture shows me at Hopewell Rocks – just outside of Moncton – remarkable because of the high tides and flower pot shaped rocks – and this time with a dusting of snow! It’s the seasonal contrasts that makes it all so exciting – between hemispheres and over the annual cycle.It’s been another full year with new projects and some new directions. From program reviews, project evaluations, visits to New Zealand and new M&E platforms for cotton, sugar and dairy. There has been on-going interest and work in developing M&E frameworks/guides for organisations and large programs. I enjoy this type of work because it establishes the basis for on-going rigorous M&E and provides a way for organisations and programs to better “tell their story”. There is remarkable work being done in the RD&E agricultural and natural resource management sectors – most of it under-reported and hence not understood.
Spring, North Queensland, and M&E
September ushers Spring in the Southern Hemisphere – and time for a blog update! In Toowoomba, after a relatively dry summer and then winter, we are hoping for some early spring rains – as is much of the farming lands across Queensland.
Winter and summer are good times to visit North Queensland, and August found us up in Townsville. This provided us with an opportunity to build on our on-going monitoring and evaluation support of reef and beef projects with DAFF (Queensland Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry) – and see what we had all learned from the last three years with the M&E and what could be modified to even better meet future needs. The challenge is to avoid duplication of many M&E demands and reporting, avoid collecting data that isn’t used in decision-making and ensure that critical data is captured well. It is good to work with project teams who proactively work through such challenges and come up with solutions.
Winter 2014
There is finally a nice crispness to the air in Toowoomba. With that, and the ticking over into a new financial year, it tells us that the year is half over! It is a calm across the RD&E sector in Australia. The projects commissioned to be finished in June are now in and paid for and the ramp up into the new year has not reached full momentum.
March 2014 Blog Update
This has been a very busy time in work commitments and very interesting projects. In between I have tried to experiment with the acrylic set that my wife, Robyn gave me for Christmas! As you can see from the picture, I still have a way to go with it! [The painting is of a lake we walked around in Canada when we were over there recently!]
October 2013 Blog Update
The year is rapidly coming to a close. Some months have passed since my last update – and its now not far off Christmas! In this time, we have managed a visit back to Canada (now that it has warmed up!) to visit family and grandchildren in Vancouver and explore the wilderness in the Rockies and Inner-Passage in Alaska! More on that later!
It has been another hectic time for evaluation and it brings some fascinating trends. There is significant interest at state and national industry levels on developing Monitoring and Evaluation Frameworks for guiding investment and reporting back on that investment. It reminds me of the early 1990s when there was widespread interest in state governments in having Extension Policies and strategies. I was involved in developing the Extension Strategy Statement at the time for the then Queensland Department of Primary Industries and this turned into my PhD on the ‘meaning’ of an extension policy.