Improve Your Evaluation Consulting with Business Processes
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Evaluation Consulting Round-Up
Part 3
“New Directions for Evaluation” is one of the American Evaluation Association’s (AEA) academic journals, and they publish articles on cutting-edge issues in the evaluation world. Recently, they released a special issue focused on being an independent evaluation consultant. This is a round-up of what we learned.
Check out the other articles in this series:
Part 1 - non-evaluation skills you need to be a good evaluation consultant.
Part 2 - managing your consulting business.
Part 3 - maximizing productivity with business processes.
Part 4 - branding and marketing.
Part 3 in this series is about business processes: a standard set of tasks you set up to produce something important for your business. This information comes from Michelle Burd’s article “Build and Improve Business Processes for Evaluation Consulting.”
A business process is a set of tasks, including the staff and materials required, that is used again and again to accomplish a goal. Processes are important for businesses because they help you operate smoothly and effectively. Examples of processes include marketing to clients and tracking staff time.
Michelle Burd interviewed several evaluation consultants at small firms to learn more about business processes in the evaluation world. As you can probably guess from the name of the article, the findings focus on two main areas: building processes and improving processes.
Build Processes
Track
Technology can help small businesses streamline tasks such as invoicing or making payments, and organize important information such as budgets or time tracking. However, using tech doesn’t make a business successful – you need to judge what tool is right for you, and make sure it doesn’t end up taking more time than it’s worth. These programs were used by the consultants interviewed:
Time tracking: Toggl, QuickBooks, Google Calendar, gtimereport, and Excel
Accounting: Xero, Quickbooks, and Excel
Project management: the article only mentioned Excel, but other options include Asana, Harvest Forecast, and Celoxis
Automate
Even though every evaluation is unique, you will find some tasks and processes that are often repeated. These tasks are great candidates for automation: save yourself time by creating reusable templates. Insert boilerplate language into these templates, and then customize them as necessary for each project. Some document templates you might find useful are:
Scope of Work (SOW)
CVs and resumes
Reference lists
Staff bios
Ethics applications (such as for an Institutional Review Board)
Automating processes doesn’t have to be complicated. It’s all about reducing unnecessary repetition and duplication of work – don’t reinvent the wheel!
Organize
This is about making your business run like a well-oiled machine through organization and standardization. Four tips were identified:
Organize roles among team members to identify who is responsible for doing what. For example, an office manager might prepare monthly budget reports, schedule meetings, and draft proposals.
Create file/ folder storage conventions. This includes how to track versions of the same document, how to name files, and which folders to include in a new project. Standard folders within every project could include Data, Billing, Planning, Reports, Research, etc.
Leverage technology to collaborate remotely. Some commonly used software to help collaboration are Trello, Slack, Dropbox, Google Suite, Skype, and Zoom or Calendly.
Communicate internally and externally. One evaluation consultant interviewed in the article regularly sends a joint email to the clients and subcontractors working on a project. The email updates everyone on work that's been completed recently, and what’s planned for the upcoming week, keeping everyone in the loop.
Improve Processes
Business processes won’t stay the same forever – they will need to be tweaked and improved as conditions in the business change. Two ways to improve processes are through evaluation and reflection.
Evaluate
Fortunately, if you are an evaluation consultant, you already know how to evaluate things (it’s kind of your job). Process mapping is a tool to formally evaluate and improve business processes. The steps for process mapping are:
Choose the process you will evaluate
High-level overview: come up with 4-7 major steps from beginning to end
Go into detail: list all the tasks involved in each of the major steps
Review the finished map and identify where things are running smoothly, and where things need some work to improve
Use real data to help drive improvement (like a good evaluator)
This process map shows the steps involved in sending a monthly update to your email list. The major steps run across the top, and specific tasks are listed under each.
Reflect
When running a business, it’s important to take the time to reflect on your business processes in a formal way so you can be thoughtful and strategic about moving forward. As an evaluation consultant, you might take a day or two once a year to ask yourself these types of questions:
Where have I been?
What type of work have I done? Did I do the kind of work I really wanted to?
What's the market been like? What new areas of work are emerging?
How have I spent money? How profitable has it been? Did investments bring the returns I expected?
How effective was my marketing?
What areas of interest are clients talking about?
What are my relationships with clients like?
Where do I want to go?
What new skills will I need?
What kinds of professional development do I want? Conferences? Writing?
What kinds of projects do I want to find in the future?
What do I want to do more of, and less of?
When you’re done, write up a plan for the coming year, and revisit it in 6 months to check your progress and make updates.
We’ve summarized in even more detail our top list of business tools for your evaluation consultancy.
In the next round-up, we delve into the world of branding and marketing.
Source:
Burd, Michelle B. “Build and Improve Business Processes for Evaluation Consulting.” New Directions for Evaluation 2019, no. 164 (2019): 69–80. https://doi.org/10.1002/ev.20385.