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How do you know if you are making a difference? : a practical handbook for public service organisations.
- Format:
- Book
- Author/Creator:
- Morton, Sarah.
- Language:
- English
- Subjects (All):
- Social service--Evaluation.
- Social service.
- Civil service--Evaluation.
- Civil service.
- Physical Description:
- 1 online resource
- Place of Publication:
- Bristol, UK : Policy Press, 2022.
- Contents:
- Front Cover
- How do you know if you are Making a Difference?: A Practical Handbook for Public Service Organisations
- Copyright information
- Dedication
- Table of contents
- List of figures and tables
- Acknowledgments
- Preface
- 1 Why is it so hard to know if you are making a difference?
- Why it is so hard to know the difference you are making
- The benefits of investing in knowing the difference you are making
- What you need to go on this journey
- A strategic approach
- Embedding learning and evaluation into organisational practice
- Public service improvement as practice
- Meanings: ideas and aspirations
- Competencies: skills, knowledge, technique
- Materials: objects, technologies
- Our approach to understanding if you are making a difference
- Anchored in practice and the practitioners of public services
- Overview of this book
- Try it yourself
- 2 Why complexity thinking can help you understand public services
- A shift in thinking for complexity-informed approaches
- Working with complex systems
- Doing the right thing, not the same thing every time
- Ways of managing in complexity
- Navigating through complexity
- People at the heart of complex change
- People experience the system in different ways
- Co-production and participatory approaches
- The 'who' in data and feedback
- Leadership for complex work
- Evaluating in complexity
- The central concept of 'contribution'
- Contribution analysis
- Appropriately different evaluation every time
- How our approach helps to work with complexity
- Building blocks of our complexity-informed approach
- Questions for exploring the complexity of your work
- 3 What data and evidence do you need to see what difference you are making?
- What is included when we talk about data, evidence and feedback?
- Good data and evidence for complex change
- Let's measure what matters
- Data cultures and how they affect organisations and initiatives
- Making the case for qualitative data
- Capturing evidence from practice
- the power of reflection
- What is happening when people 'use' data?
- Getting started on a data improvement journey
- 4 Owning your initiative's outcomes and impacts
- Navigating the landscape of outcomes and impacts
- Drivers of outcome- or impact-based approaches
- The pressures of working to multiple outcome frameworks
- Escaping multiple outcome demands by owning your outcomes
- An introduction to outcome thinking
- What we mean by an outcome
- Outcomes (or impacts) as a framework for action
- Outcomes at different levels
- Some common myths about outcomes
- A new way of working with outcomes
- Owning your outcomes: what this means in practice
- 5 Embrace the complex context
- Why context matters
- The benefits of taking time to work with context
- Notes:
- Electronic reproduction. Berlin Available via World Wide Web.
- Other Format:
- Print version:
- ISBN:
- 9781447361954
- 1447361954
- Publisher Number:
- 99992948050
- Access Restriction:
- Restricted for use by site license.
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